Disclaimer: The opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Nordiclarp.org or any larp community at large.
“Nordic larp is like porn. I know it when I see it.”((Adaptation of a quote by United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart (1964) ))
Ten years ago, when first attending the Knutpunkt conference in Norway, I was humbled by stories about Hamlet, 1942 and other great games. Here, there were people actually stretching the definition of what “larp” means. It was an awesome, mind blowing experience for sure. There were a lot of talks about the larps that were influenced by the KP tradition and vice versa. There was no good term for these games, so usually the rather cumbersome “games in the KP/SK tradition” was used.
When in 2010, Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola published the book Nordic Larp documenting 30 larps belonging to this tradition, they effectively coined the term. It had been used before, but never with such a brand recognition. Still, there was no clear definition what “Nordic larp” actually means. In discussions, one of the main points is if the term is meant geographically or not. The Nordic Larp Wiki greets its visitors with the following words:
“Nordic-style larp, or Nordic Larp, is a term used to describe a tradition of larp game design that emerged in the Nordic countries.”
So far, so good. Is it a geographical description then? “Nordic” seems to imply this and the Nordic Larp Wiki certainly defines it this way:
In 2012, Juhana Pettersson writes in States of Play (already subtitled as “Nordic Larp around the world”):
“Nordic Larp is not the same as the larps played in the Nordic countries. Indeed, most Nordic larps are not part of the Nordic Larp design movement. This leads to the bizarre situation where the Nordic Larp movement can enter into dialogue with Finnish larp the same way it can be in dialogue with Russian larp.
“Nowadays, the truly new stuff comes from all those Italians, Germans and Americans who have taken some of the ideas of Nordic Larp and made them part of their own artistic practice. Thankfully, instead of just assimilating stuff from us, they’re sending ideas back, becoming the new creative frontier of Nordic Larp.”
So the definition from the Wiki is not very useful since there are:
Larps in this tradition which are not from Nordic countries;
Larps in Nordic countries not belonging to this tradition.
So why is it still called Nordic? What’s so Nordic about Nordic larp? Maybe it is the origin of the movement. In his Nordic Larp Talk 2013, Jaakko Stenros tries to define “a” Nordic larp this way:
“A larp that is influenced by the Nordic larp tradition or contributes to the ongoing Nordic larp discourse. This definition may seem disappointing, or even like a cop-out.”((‘What does Nordic Larp mean?’, Jaakko Stenros, Nordic Larp Talks 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mL_qvBaxV5k))
Not only a cop-out, but also recursive. Thus it is not very helpful if we want to get closer to the actual meaning of the term. Furthermore he continues:
“Nordic larp is not a set of instructions. It is not even a coherent design philosophy. It is a movement.”
Well, well – it’s also not a coherent design philosophy. At least that definition empowers anybody to define their own style as Nordic. And where is the nodal point of this movement? It is, in fact, the Nodal Point conference – Knudepunkt/ Knutepunkt/Knutpunkt/Solmukohta.
Next, there is Jaakko Stenros’ version of a brand definition for the “Nordic larp tradition”:
“A tradition that views larp as a valid form of expression, worthy of debate, analysis and continuous experimentation, which emerged around the Knutepunkt convention.”
We are back to the KP/SK tradition. Not much Nordic left here though, because this tradition (r)evolves around the conferences and for at least ten years they have certainly not been entirely Nordic (in geographical terms) anymore and not the creative frontier (according to Juhana Pettersson above). Somehow we are getting nowhere.
Let’s try a different approach. The book The Foundation Stone of Nordic Larp((The Foundation Stone of Nordic Larp, 2014, Edited by Eleanor Saitta, Marie Holm-Andersen & Jon Back)) was written to give a sort of “kickstart” into the Nordic larp tradition, collecting important articles from the now 20+ books published around the Knudepunkt conference. It describes Nordic larp this way:
“The Nordic larp community differs from larp culture in other places. […] And yes, that’s right, there are other kinds of larps played in Scandinavia; the Nordic larp community is a specific and by now reasonably well-defined subset.”
So, first sentence: kind of geographic. Let’s imagine the movement is what the author implies as a “place”, because the last sentence of the paragraph is clear about the term being non-geographic. Let’s try to define the term in other ways. Also from the above paragraph:
“It spends more time telling stories that emphasize naturalistic emotion, it emphasizes collective, rather than competitive storytelling, and it takes its stories fairly seriously much of the time […]”
Jaakko Stenros’ Nordic Larp Talk also mentions some of these characteristics:
“It typically values thematic coherence, continuous illusion, action and immersion, while keeping the larp co-creative and its production noncommercial. Workshops and debriefs are common.”
These are characteristics which undoubtedly are part of the tradition we are talking about. The Nordic Larp Wiki supports this approach as well:
“[…]Here are a few examples of aims and ideals that are typical for this unique gaming scene:”
If we accept the Nordic Larp wiki as a PR instrument, this is certainly cool, but as a reference about what Nordic larp actually means, this is maybe slightly too much self-adulation. Let’s have a closer look at these characteristics and ideals:
“Immersion. Nordic larpers want to feel like they are “really there”. This includes creating a truly convincing illusion of physically being in a medieval village/on a spaceship/WWII bunker, playing a character that is very close to your own physical appearance, as well as focusing on getting under the character’s skin to ‘feel their feelings’. Dreaming in character at night is seen by some nordic larpers as a sign of an appropriate level of immersion.”
Not only is this definition of immersion mixing in 360° for good measure, the sentence about the “truly convincing illusion of physically being [there]” is also not very Nordic (at least from my personal experience) even though some games are now trying to do exactly that. The second part talking more about actual immersion could be considered very Nordic, if you like.
“Collaboration. Nordic-style larp is about creating an exciting and emotionally affecting story together, not measuring your strength. There is no winning, and many players intentionally let their characters fail in their objectives to create more interesting stories.”
This might actually be one of the better indicators for a “Nordic larp”, but then, there’s plenty of examples from other game traditions where this is used as well – but maybe not the other way around. Maybe it is required, but not sufficient?
“Artistic vision. Many Nordic games are intended as more than entertainment – they make artistic or even political statements. The goal in these games is to affect the players long term, to perhaps change the way they see themselves or how they act in society.”
Artistic vision is hard to define, as is a political statement, but there’s certainly a divide between pure “entertainment” and “serious” games. But then, aren’t the ones without a political statement artistic in their own unique way? And what about the Nordic games which are not intended as more than entertainment?
There’s certainly a lot of elements which are considered part of this tradition, but are they unique? Is “bleed”, “immersion”, “alibi” really Nordic? Are pre-game workshops, 360°, black box and debriefings? Furthermore, what is often described as “Nordic larp”, evolves with every game and every discussion about this tradition. Fifteen years ago, no game would use bleed or alibi or 360° in their descriptions (since the terms didn’t really exist) and even mechanisms, but still they were and are considered part of this tradition.
One could argue the way Merleau-Ponty does and say that while many of these are often present, none needs to be to make it a Nordic larp. The question cannot be solved this way.
Furthermore, when we used black-box-style mechanisms in 2000-2003 in the Insomnia series of games in Germany, were they “Nordic”? Did the workshops, debriefings, game acts and use of “cut”, “brems” and “escalate” mechanisms for The Living Dead (2010) make it “Nordic”?
There’s a simple answer: no. But the reason for that is not that they were not played in the Nordic countries or organized by people from there. The simple reason is that they did not add to the discourse, in one case because we hadn’t heard about KP yet, in the other case because we didn’t bother to do so.
This needs to change. I don’t think it actually matters where ideas were first tried out and who made it popular, but we need to tell people what we do and show it to them in a meaningful way if we want to be part of the movement.
“In the end, while we may rage and debate whether Nordic larp actually isn’t all that special, reality is that it is. And let’s use that for our advantage instead of trying to nitpick.”((Claus Raasted, January 14 2015 in a private conversation on Facebook))
– Claus Raasted
Conclusion
I truly believe there is something special about the kind of games we create. I also do think that creating a term like “Nordic Larp” was a masterstroke of Knudepunkt/ Knutepunkt/Knutpunkt/Solmukohta propaganda.
And this is what I’m going to do((And maybe edit that page in the Nordic Larp Wiki and remove that ridiculous geographic reference.)): Nordic larp. No matter where I am or where I come from. It’s where I’ve been heading all my larping life and I don’t really care how we call it as long as we know what it means. I believe we do.
Because if we can’t agree upon what Nordic larp means, others will form their own slightly worrying conclusions:
“Meanwhile, in Europe, some people were already making a living from LARPing and stretching its art in interesting directions. Claus Raasted [sic], for example, fused parlor roleplay with very serious topics, such as acting out couples’ therapy to pretend to grieve for a dead child. The genre spread through the region and became known as Nordic LARP.”((Olivia Simone, tabletmag.com, Sep 2 2014 getting more facts wrong than right in this “definition” of the term.))
Nobody really can tell you what Nordic larp actually is, but who cares as long as Claus Raasted is the godfather of Nordic LARP?
The pre-game workshop tradition in Nordic larp is mostly oral, with little written material. People take part in workshops as players, then borrow and develop ideas from those experiences to construct workshops for their own larps. So I thought it might be useful to put together a method which looks at some of the different intentions and purposes that workshop activities can have, to help designers think about and plan their workshops more systematically.
The table below lists and categorizes workshop activities that I use in my own practice, or that I will use if I run a larp that requires them. The sequence of the table is the sequence in which I use these activities: ie. first working on the players themselves, then working with them on their characters; start with warmup, move on to impro basics if required, and so on. There may be requirements to move back and forth (eg. perhaps a re-warmup will be needed partway through, or meta-techniques may be practised again in-character), but it’s this general direction.
In practice you may use workshop activities that have more than one purpose: this may be desirable both for conciseness and for helping to reinforce the activity impact upon players. For example, flashback scenes can be used to calibrate players’ understanding of relationships with each other. Or the way to teach a particular technique could also serve as a trust exercise.
I’ve given an example activity for each aim, but of course there are many different ways of achieving all of them: some will be more appropriate for some larps than for others; and you’ll have your own favourites. The useful Workshop Handbook site has a categorized collection of activities which give plenty more examples.
A few of the items talk about ‘calibration’. This is a very important larp-preparation concept, introduced by Martin Nielsen (2014). The short definition is: “all participants adjust their interpretation of a phenomenon, so that all participants have more or less the same interpretation.” (Where I take “phenomenon” to mean something like: an aspect of the culture being portrayed/experienced in the larp.)
(click to open PDF version of this table)
* Safety exercises aren’t always included in workshops; indeed they’re quite rare in some larping cultures. But I personally feel that there should always be at least a minimum safety brief.
Details
Spelling each of these out in more detail:
Introduction– the frame through which players enter the workshop and the game. Welcome them, check off names if appropriate, tell everyone what the game is that they’re about to play, tell them that now they are in the pre-game workshop.
Practicalities – those useful things players need to know so they can be comfortable in the space. Where are the bathrooms, where are the exits, can they eat and drink, how long will the workshop and the game last, will there be breaks… etc.
Structure and purpose – explain why this game is preceded by a workshop, and what will be achieved during it. You may want to go into detail about the workshop activities – more likely, you’ll just give a general picture. (Or you may want to keep the activities secret for now, so the players aren’t expecting them.)
Warmup – important to get players relaxed, disinhibited, and moving freely. There are lots of great warmup exercises, such as Penguins and flamingos, Human knot, Jump in jump out, Shake hands… Choose exercises that are appropriate for your number of players and for the space that you’re using.
Impro basics – simple exercises to reinforce (or to introduce, if your players are new to this) the basic improvisation tools of Yes, and…, Not blocking, and so on.
Physicality – this may be important if the game requires physical contact, but your players are unaccustomed to it in their larp tradition, or are strangers to each other. The exercises should familiarize them with each other’s touch, proximity and presence. This doesn’t need to be any more intense than it will be in the larp itself.
Trust – particularly useful in emotionally intense games. If you can help players become comfortable entrusting themselves to each other’s care, it’ll make opening up emotionally that much easier.
Out-of-game – this won’t always be required, particularly if you’re going straight from the workshop into the game. But if you need to explain practicalities of travel, food, sleeping etc relating to the game, now is the time to do it.
Expectations of play – you may prefer to let these emerge naturally, of course, or to let players infer them from the material. But if you’re expecting a particular style or mode of play – for example, if the game’s intended as a farcical satire in which nothing makes sense; or if players are to act with grand, exaggerated gestures to communicate their emotions; or you expect them to act like hardened criminals who behave as if their every move is under watch – tell them so, and explain that you will be showing them how to do it later in the workshop.
Skills – some games may require the players to use out-of-game skills that they do not (yet) themselves have. If dancing is an important part of the game, you may need to teach them how to dance appropriately: and so on.
Safety – go through the safety policy and practice of the game, and act out examples where that’ll be helpful. Cut, Brake, ‘The door is open’, Traffic lights, Lines and veils – whatever you’re using. You need to make sure that the players are familiar and comfortable with the safety techniques, and (ideally) that they won’t hesitate to use them – or to interpret other players’ using them – during the course of the game.
Rules and system – where present. For example, in a combat larp, there may be rules about how many blows will cause injury or death. Or if there’s non-WYSIWYG magic, players may need to be told how to interpret its commands. Explain and practise until they are familiar.
Techniques – this covers unnatural things that players may have to do during the game for some (non-meta) purpose. So, for example, suppose your game features a fantasy culture who traditionally greet each other by clasping each others’ forearms between their backs. You want the players to learn this manoeuvre and to practice it until it comes as easily to them as it does to the characters that they’re playing.
Meta-techniques – techniques that are ‘meta’, ie. that operate outside the game reality and allow players to communicate directly (rather than as their characters) in some way. Maybe you want players to be able to deliver an internal monologue of their character’s current thoughts: they will need to learn the meta-technique that triggers it, such as standing in a designated part of the room, or having their glass pinged by another player.
Mutual understanding of game world — very important if the setting is not a familiar one. If players have differing internal assumptions about how the world works or of facts about it, that can cause problems in the game. This element of calibration is best carried out by discussion, followed by improvised scenes using the established knowledge. The GMs should provide guidance and suggestions.
Mutual understanding of relationships – if characters are already designed, the players need to make sure that they and the people with whom they have relationships (of any kind) have a shared understanding of what those relationships are and how they work. This is best done by discussion, and again can be followed by improvised scenes acting out the relationship (for the more important ones).
Creating characters from players’ own ideas – in some games, the players will invent their characters wholly, within the workshop. The GMs will have to explain how to do this, and facilitate the process.
Around a GM-designed skeleton – in other games, players may have been given a skeleton character that they fill out themselves. If you have time, one nice way of doing this is with a ‘prelude’ – a one-on-one GMed scene in which the player is led through decisions and statements about their character that combine to flesh it out fully and satisfyingly.
Practical – if there’s any system or rules (or numbers of any kind) applicable to character creation, GMs need to explain them and help players apply them.
Role exploration and definition – if the character is to play a particular narrative role in the game (eg. captain of the ship, mysterious stranger, disruptive toddler, Prussian spy) then GMs may need to brief the player on how to fulfil those duties.
Building character relationships – allow the players to mutually establish their characters’ attitudes towards, and history with, each other – where this is appropriate for the game. GMs might shape this strongly or leave it to the players: different activities will be appropriate.
Rehearsing those relationships – for newly-established material and also where characters have been designed in advance (by GMs or players) and players haven’t previously had the chance to explore them. A combination of discussion and playing out interpersonal scenes is generally effective.
Background filling-in – it may be desirable to add richness to players’ understanding of each other’s characters by the public provision of detail. Hot seat is a straightforward activity that allows players to question one another.
Take-off – you may wish to help the players get ‘into character’ so they don’t have to leap straight into the game (although that can work too: see Flying start). This might perhaps be a formal exercise where they assume their characters, or a quiet meditative space for them to do so privately or as a group.
Once upon a time – actually, at GenCon 2014 in Indianapolis, USA – several of us discovered a design problem for live freeform games. For the last five years, the independent role-playing game scene here in North America has run an expanding series of crowdsourced events under the banner of Games on Demand. Players show up shortly before the convention slot, choose an available game from a menu, and then sit down with the event facilitator to play. This year, we introduced Larps on Demand, a branch of Games on Demand with its own room at Origins and GenCon, and that is where we encountered our problem.
The problem is as follows: GenCon and Origins are both massive conventions full of interesting things and people to see. As such, few attendees want to make intensive four-hour time commitments in this context, and thus we watched as the two-hour Larps on Demand events filled up, while the four-hour events did not and were cancelled. In response, facilitators began to split their four-hour events in two, and running larps in public spaces to attract visibility.
In our post-GenCon debrief, we decided that established live freeform games that lasted two hours such as J. Tuomas Harviainen’s The Tribunal required too many players, whereas a flexible game like Håken Lid and Ole Peder Giæver’s The Hirelings required too much time, and Lizzie Stark’s The Curse required intimate space that was at a premium in a large convention setting. What were we to do?
Thus the Golden Cobra Challenge for October 2014 was born. We would solve this live freeform problem by considering it as a set of design constraints in itself. Scrappy pervasive freeforms were what we needed. Therefore, the game submissions had to:
Be playable from start to finish in two hours or less, facilitated by people who were not the designer him/herself.
Be playable by a variable but small number of participants, ideally a wide range like 2–8.
Be playable in a public space, like an open lounge in a busy hallway.
Optional: Use the ingredients Chord, Light, Solution, Bear and Minute.
We advertised it as a “friendly contest open to anyone interested in writing and playing freeform games,” and even provided a much-utilized mentor program for freeform designers who wanted to bounce their ideas off a partner. We would award prizes in categories corresponding with our design needs: Most Convention- Ready, Most Appealing to Newcomers, Cleverest Design, and Game We’re Most Eager to Play. That being said, the prize for each category was that the game would be run at least once at Metatopia in November 2014.
II. The Baddest-Ass Snakes in the Jungle
What came of it? Over 50 freeform submissions poured in from around the world, addressing the design constraints with verve and creativity. Designers and theorists once again debated definitions of “freeform”, while others saw fit to troll the contest with unmarked submissions (e.g. Vampire Death Party by A. Nohn Knee-Mus). As the judges volunteering our time, we could only scramble to keep up with the breadth of entries submitted by experienced and novice designers alike. In fact, the contest itself served as a sort of “permission and validation engine” for people who did not consider themselves designers – even for those beset with imposter syndrome – to create live freeforms.
New designers were most welcome. As Wendy Gorman, co-designer (with David Hertz and Heather Silsbee) of Still Life, commented:
I was shocked and delighted [by winning a Golden Cobra], and could not have been more pleased to see something of mine played by people who are well respected in the field of game design, especially since I am not a game designer, and have never considered that I could become one.
Two hours, a public space, and a flexible player number meant that a short set of easy-to-communicate rules proved the best design strategy. Because few veteran designers had much experience in addressing the constraints, the playing field proved more level than in other RPG design contests. After all, we preferred to cultivate a broad community that would produce more games, rather than promoting exclusivity and competition among creators. Mentoring during the contest and rewarding the winning designs with actual play appeared the best ways to nurture such a community of play.
The hard-selected winners of the contest came from a pool of the weird, wacky and dramatic. Some entries in this pool included Active Shooter by Tim Hutchings, a serious freeform dealing with the school shooter phenomenon; Snow by Agata Lubańska, about an explosive family situation in a snowed-in car; Keymaster by J Li, a ritual of creating fictional identities; and If I Were President by James Stuart, which enacts a surreal presidential debate in the far future. Contest winners often adhered closest to the given constraints. Still Life, a game about relationships between rocks, positions players as inanimate objects being moved around by elemental forces in a public space.
Group Date by Sara Williamson embraces chaos, with the same date between two people being played out simultaneously by multiple groups. Glitch Iteration by Jackson Tegu explores fragmented computer memory and has players directly experience their surroundings as unstable simulations. Finally, Unheroes by Joanna Piancastelli deals with a group of superheroes who have altered reality to cover up a terrible mistake and must now make a critical decision. Many of the games would perform well in busy GenCon hallways in Indianapolis, as they did in the Metatopia hall.
III. The Golden Cobra Hand Signal
Live freeform in the United States has a history of being behind closed doors and opaque for newcomers. The Golden Cobra Challenge sought to amend that culture and, at the very least, create a stable of new games to try out at Games on Demand in GenCon 2015 and other conventions. But what it also produced – besides innovative new sets of rules and role-playing scenarios – was a quasi-new social phenomenon: role-players out in public playing games designed for public interference. Emerging from Metatopia, the Golden Cobra Hand Signal – putting one’s elbow in one’s hand and forming a snake face with the other hand – lets others know that, while you may be out in a park or hallway, you are actually also in the middle of playing a game and a role.
Games like Still Life encourage outsiders to affect and interact with these players, but the outside world may still not necessarily understand what they are doing. As these drop-in-friendly live freeforms spread and mutate, we hope to see more of these arcane gestures coming to a convention near you.
2013 and 2014 may be remembered as the conception of the Nordic blockbuster larp. Two ambitious larps – The Monitor Celestra in Sweden and College of Wizardry in Poland – succeeded in attracting an unprecedented level of international attention from media and players. They did so, in part, by advertising their inspiration from established fictional worlds with large fan followings (Battlestar Galactica and Harry Potter respectively), and by the choice of spectacular and eye-grabbing locations: a naval destroyer turned spaceship, and a castle made into a wizarding college.
Both productions were created by large teams: Celestra boasted a team of 85 people, while College of Wizardry had a team of 20 organizers and helpers, plus 33 NPC players. Although they were partially run by professional larpmakers, they were both nonprofit games((While none of the CoW organizers got paid for their efforts, some Celestra organizers got a small payment.)). A ticket to College of Wizardry cost €180 and a ticket to Celestra twice as much, but they both provided players with room and board, as well as some costuming, yielding good value for money. The 32-hour Celestra was run three times for a total of 389 players, with plans for remakes. College of Wizardry, capitalizing on the success of the initial 138-player run, sold out tickets to the 2015 re-run in minutes.
However, this is not a story about production. Neither massive production teams, enthusiastic players, nor spectacular locations are by themselves enough to create a successful larp((As many participants of the spectacular art festival / forgepttable larp Futuredrome (2002) are probably aware.)). This is a story about the design model the Celestra team happened upon in their effort to produce a large larp on a rushed schedule – a model that mixed recent innovations from experimental and progressive Nordic larps back into the tried-and-true approach we will call brute force design. This is a story of how that model was further refined at College of Wizardry, and about how these larps may even set the new norm in how to create action-packed fast-paced larp entertainment for mature audiences.
Brute Force Design
Before the progressive Nordic tradition of larp, there was brute force design. Nobody, of course, called it that – they called it “organizing larp”. We are proposing this name retroactively to describe an approach to designing larps that we often encountered in our own scenes the 90s, and still recognize in many of the larps produced in other traditions.
At a typical brute force larp, designers will use a plethora of techniques to drive conflict and mystery, such as:
Characters are split into groups with conflicting agendas (orcs want to kill elves)
There are subgroups inside groups (the elvish general wants to attack head-first to show bravery, while the king favors a stealthy approach)
There are power hierarchies (the general commands the officers who command the soldiers)
There are secrets, which players can discover, hoard, and trade (the general is a traitor plotting to kill the king)
There are puzzles that can be solved (assemble a torn-up treasure map)
Run-time game mastering is conducted by triggering events, introducing surprises, and inserting messenger characters (an NPC scout enters the tent of the king, informing that a horde of undead is approaching the camp)
The key characteristic of brute force isn’t that it uses any one of the techniques in this list, but that it uses a lot of them simultaneously.
Rather than the less is more approach common in the last decade of Nordic larp design, the brute designer will embrace quantity over quality and insist that, in fact, more is more. The results of that are unpredictable and chaotic, but seldom boring. Some of the conflicts and puzzles might be completely forgotten, while others command center-stage. The larp exemplified above might end in a battle of four armies, the discovery of an ancient treasure, an elvish civil war, or all of these at the same time.
In addition to the philosophy of more is more, a typical brute force design combines the diegetic social structure of colliding power hierarchies, and the dramatic structure built around discovery of hidden narrative, with the assumption that players will play to win.
Colliding Power Hierarchies
In a power hierarchy, the higher ranks have the right to command the lower ranks, and expect their orders – within limits – to be followed. Power hierarchies are overt: everyone knows who the boss is. Both these features distinguish power hierarchies from more subtle status hierarchies typically ignored by brute force designers, which describe who is socially dominant, who is allocated more attention, and whose voice is more respected.
Power hierarchies make for easy role-playing. Neither the givers nor receivers of orders should be in any doubt as to how to perform their character’s social role. They also come with clear affordances for dramatic tension: the potential for rebellion is implicit in every tyranny, and every weak leader invites intrigue for succession.
To make things more interesting, though, the brute designer will rarely settle for just one power hierarchy. Instead, games are built around the contested relationships of multiple groups. The simplest possible collision is between two hierarchies pursuing mutually exclusive goals: both the orcs and the elves are looking for the ring of power, but only one side can have it.
More complex collisions happen when characters are given allegiance to more than one hierarchy (i.e. both family and close friends), or when some allegiances are secret and aim to subvert the visible hierarchy.
These collisions serve to furnish the larp with conflict, but they also provide characters with dramatic choices: to serve country or ideology, friend or family.
Discovery of Hidden Narrative
Brute force designs will usually distribute clues and puzzle pieces throughout the game, but they aim to be more than simple treasure hunts. The clues spread through character backgrounds and introduced by NPCs will often combine to reveal back story, the diegetic myths of the past that preceded the larp, and that often impart important further clues on how to win it; for example, by revealing the true motivations of other characters. Buried items combine to form game-changing weapons, or devices that reveal even more of the backstory.
In this way, the larp designer tries to fit the players’ experiences into a larger diegetic narrative, one that began long before the larp, and which is meant to give the unfolding of the larp meaning in the context of that larger narrative.
Playing to Win
The structures of colliding hierarchies and puzzle – solving implicitly invite participants to play to win. After all, outside of roleplaying, puzzles are usually meant to be solved and games about conflict are usually played for the thrill and challenge of seeking victory.
When the brute designer can assume that players will try to reach their goals within a limited set of strategic choices, their behaviour becomes comparatively easy to give direction: the designer only needs to dictate goals and rewards for each individual or group, thereby defining what constitutes “winning” for them, and manage their resources and strategic alternatives.
Playing to win, which is the core of gamism (see Kim 1998), usually requires the players to compromise between roleplay and gameplay. A player may try to achieve a coherent and true-to-genre portrayal of their character, complete with personal flaws that would hinder the character in conflicts of the larp. But the moment the player faces a strategically important decision, those flaws and attitudes are often discarded in order to achieve victory.
Ups and Downs of Brute Force
Playing to win is the default expectation of most people approaching a game, while power hierarchies make for the clearest possible social roles and relationships, and the existence of secret hierarchies and solvable puzzles match Hollywood genres such as the murder mystery, the spy story, and the supernatural thriller. For this reason, brute force larps tend to be easy to play and require little explanation.
The brute force approach easily brings about a string of great scenes and powerful moments for the players.
It is also resilient against mistakes; a malfunctioning plot will be overtaken by a functional one. Finally, the sheer amount of content – more is more – usually leaves each player with plenty of options for what to do next.
The key word, though, is “usually”: the chaos of brute force design provides no guarantees – of anything. And implicit in the model are also a number of dangers.
First of all, players in a brute force larp easily get overrun by a plot train. Secretly digging for treasure in the forest? Too bad. The elves just attacked, and the forest is the battleground. Adrenaline-pumped and ready to fight the final battle?
A pity; the generals just declared a truce in order to to pursue the hunt for hidden treasure. The emergent narrative of one group can easily disable the play of another group; crisis and conflict in particular trump subtler themes.
With power hierarchies comes the risk of plot monopolization: the characters at the top, if they play their cards strategically and sensibly, tend to sniff out and take control of the business of their underlings. Plot for the underlings is tricky to begin with: two kings are easier to write than twenty soldiers, and the designer’s attention – biased by a lifetime of exposure to film and literature – is often attracted to the former.
With the atmosphere of secrecy that hidden narrative and potential traitors tend to produce, the monopolized plots tend to become opaque, known only to leaders and their trusted advisors. At their worst, brute force designs provide great entertainment for the handful of players with high-ranking characters, at the expense of all the other players.
As mentioned, playing to win often leads players to sacrifice character coherence when encountering strategic choices. Increasing the number of plots further fragments the experience: the fisherman’s wife no longer has a function when the larp turns to battle against the orcs.
When overrun by a competing plot train, the player will need to reinterpret their character as someone different, someone who actually has a role to play in the plot. Brute force larps, while they often yield memorable scenes, also generate moments of frustration as players need to internally renegotiate their characters while steering((See The Art of Steering by Montola, Stenros & Saitta in The Knudepunkt 2015 Companion Book.)) around plots and colliding allegiances.
Players do not always accept such compromises. At any given brute force larp of the 1990s, you would find individuals who approached the larp with other ideals than playing to win, culminating in manifestoes such as Dogma 99 (Fatland & Wingård 1999) and the Manifesto of the Turku School (Pohjola 2000) that confronted gamist play from different perspectives.
Dogma 99 prohibited backstory, secrecy, main plots, main characters and “superficial” action – in other words: hidden narrative and colliding hierarchies. The Turku Manifesto insisted that players should approach roleplaying with no other goal than to immerse in character, dispensing with goals such as playing to win, and implied that a coherent and selfconsistent simulation, free of narrative direction, should be the goal of larp designers.
Subsequent innovations in the Nordic larp discourse have served to emphasize, facilitate, and focus on those other ideals, from perfectly coherent simulation to faithfulness to the genre and narrative arcs.
These newer arthaus larps have emphasized relationships over conflict, implicit status over explicit power, life in the trenches over the adrenaline of the battlefield. They have evolved techniques such as workshopping, blackbox scenes and inner monologues to broaden the expression and to help players develop characters deeper.
Some have surrounded their players with a fully immersive 360° illusion (Koljonen 2007) made of impeccable physical representations and simulated access to outside world, while others have done away with physical illusion entirely and used empty rooms with stage lights, symbolic props and non-diegetic music.
Surveying the state of the Nordic larp discourse at 2012, it appears that brute force had fallen entirely out of fashion in this progressive scene.
Brute Force in The Monitor Celestra
The Monitor Celestra was a larp set in the world of Battlestar Galactica. It was played on the Halland-class destroyer HMS Småland, built in 1951. The game was created around the vision of playing space drama within a beautiful self-enclosed environment of 360° illusion in the spirit of the classic Swedish larps Carolus Rex (1999) and Hamlet (2002).
The organizers went to great lengths turning the museum ship into a decommissioned Monitor-class vessel commandeered for military use in the aftermath of the fall of the Twelve Colonies of Kobol. Most notably, the larp featured a system of control terminals for navigating through the galaxy, communicating with other vessels, and fighting space battles.
During the first act, the Celestra found herself stranded in deep space, separated – perhaps irrevocably – from the remainder of humanity, pursued by the vast firepower of the enemy Cylons, with onboard society deeply fractured.
At the first glance, the Celestra design bears resemblance to a typical brute force larp. Celestra featured at least a dozen colliding power hierarchies ranging from Colonial Navy to the civilian crew of the vessel, from the Vergis corporation to organized crime factions. The larp was set in the immediate aftermath of the destruction of human civilization, so which of these hierarchies would command the allegiance of any one character was anyone’s guess.
The game masters had prepared surprises, such as Cylon infiltrators, and occasionally brought in non-player characters to stir the pot. There were hidden narratives to be discovered by piecing together clues and asking NPCs the right questions.
For example, the players could figure out the origin story of the three Cylon models, determining whether they were friend or enemy, and learn to understand the holographic ghosts that haunted the ship. Clearly, the philosophy of more is more was at work.
However, The Monitor Celestra added several elements to the concoction. While not all design choices worked out equally well, we can discern a new model of larp design in the combination of the ones that did.
While these additions were mostly triedand- true design solutions, the way they fit together and complemented each other was new and unique, with the potential to improve significantly on the brute force design model.
Playing to Lose
Most importantly, the Celestra team subverted the brute force tradition by insisting that all participants play to lose. The players were instructed in detail on how to avoid winning the larp, and were obliged to follow that instruction: in fact The Monitor Celestra Briefing document distributed to players proclaimed that “playing to win is for asshats anyway”.
Although Celestra may have been the first Nordic larp to explicitly tell players to play to lose, the idea goes back at least to Keith Johnstone’s (1979) work on improvisational theatre. At previous Nordic larps focused on oppression or tragedy, such as Hamlet, the necessity of playing to lose did not need to be articulated: these larps did not make any sense if approached with a gamist mentality.
Celestra also subverted gamism at its holy of holies, with gun rules emphasizing responsibility and drama over fairness and challenge:
A gun controls a room until another gun is pulled. […] The rule is simple: they get what they want, whereupon the gun is holstered or otherwise removed from play. It’s the responsibility of the whole room involved to play up the lethality of the situation […] When the gun wielder has gotten what she wanted, it is her responsibility to get the gun out of play – by running away (good luck with that), holstering the gun, dropping it and surrendering, or stand down in some other way […] You can never stop someone brandishing a gun from getting what she wants, except by pulling another gun. The second gun now trumps the first.
The Monitor Celestra Briefing
Breaking Up Plot Monopoly
In addition to asking that participants play to lose, Celestra featured widespread player duties((In Celestra they were called “out of character duties”, but we chose to simplify the expression.)). The scientist characters were instructed to share secrets late in the game for dramatic impact, or to introduce other characters to HoloBand equipment used to create diegetic black box scenes in the style of the Caprica TV series.
Civilian journalists were instructed to gather information, to keep everyone posted, and to activate civilians by providing them with news to play on. Corporate middle management had player duties to keep the game dynamic by repeatedly gaining the trust of one of the factions and then switching sides or staging coups.
Most of the player duties served to break up plot monopolies and emphasized playing to lose: to have characters reveal secrets they strategically should have kept to themselves, to involve and inform others of their agendas and back story.
While in a typical brute force larp, power hierarchies end up serving the players on the top, Celestra sought to make them serve the players at the bottom. The tops of the hierarchies received extensive player duties, encouraging them to funnel plot downwards in the hierarchy and make choices leading to better roleplay, rather than making strategically smart decisions.
Being a cog in the machine provides the player with a social role and game content, even when it means running errands or monitoring a comms terminal. By building an elaborate 360° illusion, with technology simulating a fully functional spaceship, such tasks could be set up to give nominally bottom-tier characters agency and relevance.
Being in charge of the comms terminal meant that the messenger could withhold or sell crucial information, and the engineers in the reactor could shut off power to other parts of the ship at a whim. Even when they chose to obey orders to the letter, these characters were exercising agency.
In terms of play experience, though, not all errands are equal. Especially in the first run, some players noticed that tasks such as standing guard alone made for poor play experience.
Playing a leader in this kind of an environment and guiding the experience of subordinates is akin to game mastering without the overview that the actual game masters enjoy: highly dependent not just on player skill set but also on the information provided by the organizers. In the second run leaders were instructed to make people always work in pairs.
Especially after this change, the players at the bottom of the hierarchy had better experiences of Celestra than the players left entirely outside one: It was much better to play a crewman in the engine room than a refugee without a place.
The Power of Established World Material
In brute force games, players sometimes have an incoherent understanding of how to behave in the game. This pertains to things such as acting style (should every sentence uttered by elf queens sound like a fateful prophecy) and to diegetic culture (how should an elf scout salute his queen).
Being based on two television shows, Celestra got both the acting style and the diegetic culture almost for free – very few changes were made to the established world material, so everyone could have an equal understanding on how the world worked. Both players and designers drew on the characteristic narrative patterns of Galactica, such as the ever-present conflict between civilian and military leadership.
Another way of controlling players’ stylistic choices is through employing an act structure. An act structure, inspired by theatrical storytelling, divides a larp into temporal chunks with explicitly different play style instructions and even conflict rules. Act structures and player duties have been used in some form in Nordic larps since the late 90s((At least since Moirais Vev, organized by Eirik Fatland and others, in Norway, in 1997. )), but Celestra may have been the first to combine these with brute force design elements.
The four acts took the game from collaboration against the common Cylon enemy to space exploration, internal conflict, and finally the critical moments that would decide the fates of the Celestra and everyone inside. In the fashion of the 2002 larp Hamlet, player characters could only die in the last act – and indeed, the conflicts inside the ship escalated steadily so that characters dropped like flies in the final hours.
The Celestra Model and The Monitor Celestra
Celestra went a long way in reworking brute force design. By using established world material and slicing the larp into acts with clear purpose, player confusion was reduced and the risk of plot trains going stray was lowered. By asking participants to play to lose and distributing player duties, the tendency towards plot monopolization could be counteracted.
A thorough and technology-assisted 360° illusion made the world more coherent, gave agency to the lower rungs of the hierarchies, and made the Celestra a spectacular aesthetic journey.
In short, this was the secret sauce of The Monitor Celestra:
Brute force + play to lose + player duties + act structure + 360° illusion + established world material.
We’ll call this The Celestra model, although it should be noted that this is the model we, as critics and participants, discern in the functional and mutually dependent parts of the design. For example, some techniques employed in Celestra have been intentionally omitted: the larp featured phantom players, diegeticblackbox scenes and verbally roleplayed Viper battles, which were not essential to the overall structure discussed in here. Thus it is not necessarily the model conceived of by the design team.
How did it work? Amongst the Celestra participants we find those who, two years after the event, cherish the time spent on the Småland as the greatest cultural experience of their life. But we also find players who left in rage and frustration long before the game had ended, and are still certain that was the right decision((Eirik Fatland played a Vergis corporation scientist, Markus Montola played the faction leader of the Colonial Navy. Due to the complexity of the larp, these vantage points only covered a fraction of the game: As Montola headed one hierarchy and Fatland was subject to another, the experience of not being a part of one remains underrepresented in this text. Both authors played in the second run of the game.)).
While these extremes are both unusual outcomes of a larp, they are not contradictory: a larp design may work differently for different players, depending on many factors such as the character they play, their personal preferences in larp design, their personal preparation and so on.
The players celebrating the larp, who are in the majority, will remember it as an important milestone in Nordic larp history – in terms of costuming, scenography, gameplay, technology and design – and as an action-packed, adventurous and emotional journey in an interactive 360° environment.
However, the critical voices are also clear. Some of the worst experiences were had by players who attended the first run, and were caused by errors that were fixed – in part due to constructive feedback from those players – for the second run. But there were also negative experiences reported at the second and third runs.
The impressive complexity of the design, with dependencies between collapsing hierarchies, individuals, and computer systems, made the game very fragile. For example, in the first run the seemingly minor problem of a lack of an instruction manual for the systems – one document amongst hundreds – had game-ruining consequences for many players.
In the second run of the game, it was very hard for players to distinguish fact from fiction in the rumour mill going on inside the game, and solidly determine whether Cylons had actually infected the onboard computers or not. Replicating the clockwork operation of a full battleship with complicated social roles, social groupings and spatial designs was an amazing experience when it worked, but it was highly vulnerable to the disruptive chaos of a brute force design.
While recognizing this, we think it is equally important to recognize that Celestra is celebrated as a major achievement and life-changing event by many players. That many of its production and design choices, such as the unsurpassed quality of organizer-provided costuming or the interaction with mysterious phantoms, were executed perfectly. And that by daring to innovate on such a large scale, The Monitor Celestra set the stage for future larps that could iron out the kinks in its groundbreaking approach.
Robust Adventure in College of Wizardry
College of Wizardry was a larp inspired by the Harry Potter fiction, played in the 13th century Czocha castle in southwestern Poland. The game ran uninterrupted for 52 hours, portraying the first days of the school year at the Czocha College of Witchcraft and Wizardry. The game was a combination of school routines (teaching classes, pranking other Houses to lose points, snitching about pranksters) and adventure (sneaking around the basement, fighting Death Eaters, handing out detention for such activities), culminating in a grand opening ball.
In the spirit of the 360° illusion, the Czocha castle served as a perfect environment for this game: not only is Zamek Czocha a fully furnished castle, but it is also a remarkably Potteresque one: it features a cellar for Potions classes, a tower for Divination, a dungeon for Defence Against the Dark Arts, and large dining halls for common dinners. It even comes with secret passages hidden behind bookshelves and panels. To perfect the illusion, the organizers handed out robes and ties that were the required parts of the school uniform, while the players brought in loads of small props, such as notebooks, trinkets, and wands with LEDs to light the tunnels.
Even with no physical combat, CoW was a larp for all senses, where you actually drank wine with frat boys in the common room, actually wrote an essay with a faux quill, and actually sneaked quietly in order to avoid janitors after curfew((Players’ contribution to the larp was considerable: for example, Liselle Angelique Krog Awwal made more than a thousand props for the game, Christopher Sandberg organized the professor players to produce a 200-page schoolbook, and Staffan Rosenberg created the Potions laboratory with hundreds of ingredients, tools and recipes. As player-created content was integrated to organizer materials, it is not easy to retrospectively say which parts were in the game “by design”, and which ones should be considered “player contributions” external to the design itself.)).
According to Claus Raasted, the figurehead of College of Wizardry, some of the design was directly inspired by The Monitor Celestra:
The school setting made it especially easy to utilize this [kind of design]. Teacher/student interaction, house rivalries, bloodline conflicts, former school cliques, junior/sophomore/senior conflicts, etc. The list goes on and on, and all of these structures were good at producing emergent narrative and interesting stories. If you weren’t interested in doing one specific area of play, there were always five more you could dive into.
Claus Raasted, personal communication
Since the organizers knew they would have an international and varied audience, College of Wizardry was intentionally designed to be hard to break: according to Raasted, a key component was to disconnect game design from character design, which gave the organizers a lot of flexibility. Once you have a fully functional school larp with all the appropriate structures in place, the larp is going to work regardless of individual students and teachers((In Celestra, a similar approach was used in the sense that many character descriptions spent vast majority of text to describe the social structures and out of character function of the character, and very few paragraphs on descriptions of personality, or personal goals. As a major difference, CoW explicitly permitted players to radically work on their characters.)).
The academic schedule was a perfect example of a design element that was hard to break. No matter what kind of a student or professor your character was, for most of the time the school schedule answered the question of what to do in the game.
Lectures, meals, and club meetings would largely proceed no matter what else happened. Good work catching that Azkaban escapee, ten points for your House, now attend your Divination class before you lose them. The academic schedule interwoven with an act structure((Unlike most games with act structures, CoW was played continuously. Diegetic events signified act changes.)) provided both game content and an arc of escalation and de-escalation, which worked well as a broader framework for emergent stories. Due to the laissezfaire attitude towards characters, the solid backbone of established world material, and everyone playing to lose, College of Wizardry could adopt a strict policy of your character not ours, a policy which would break most games, but made this one more robust:
The first rule of characters for College of Wizardry is that you can change the character if you don’t like it. […] If the character is a troublemaker with a heart of gold, but you’d rather play a cowardly snitch who’s obsessed with the rules, then we’ll change it. The only thing it needs is ideas from you on what you’d rather play instead, and together we’ll make it work.
College of Wizardry player instructions
This allowed the organizers to max out player agency: players were explicitly instructed that changes pertaining to diegetic facts were allowed even while the game was running. The message was clear: you traveled all the way to Czocha for a 52- hour larp; if it doesn’t work for you, change it. And if you can’t change it yourself, the game masters will help you.
The hard to break principle also showed up in other areas of the game. As staff players were given player duties, if perhaps not as explicitly as in Celestra, the students were liberated to do whatever they liked, as the carefully cast professors would eventually contain any player-created crisis.
The magic system was made hard to break by basing it on the principle of playing to lose: whenever a spell was cast on a character, the target player would ultimately decide the effects of the spell, meaning that student duels would always end in one of the players choosing to lose.
The only exceptions were that no-one could die before the final act, and that the staff would always win magical conflicts with students. While Celestra had a main plotline to resolve that players were able to impact and to a certain extent break, CoW eschewed one altogether.
The staff players adopted even more practices to open up student play. For instance, the organizers suggested that the professors should accept every excuse to skip class, which provided the student players the freedom to swap classes, to go adventuring, or even to take a much-needed nap.
While in Celestra most characters belonged to power hierarchies, in College of Wizardry, every player character was a part of them. In that sense, the equation was very simple as the game only featured three kinds of player characters: students, professors, and a very few members of the janitorial staff((While the Celestra had very few non-player characters, College of Wizardry had a cadre of them, ranging from ever-present ghosts and visiting Aurors to monsters residing in the nearby forest. The nonplayer experiences are excluded from this analysis, since there was no uniform NPC experience due to the difference of those roles.)). Even the characters who did not belong to secret societies or student Houses were a part of the broader school hierarchy. This structure largely eliminated the outsider caste, giving everyone a part in the community. Indeed, according to the evaluation survey it appears that College of Wizardry worked best for the students, then for the professors, and worst for the less integrated janitorial staff.
The power hierarchy was also very wide and interchangeable: While the ship hierarchies of Celestra could only have one captain and one first mate at the top tiers, the professors were largely interchangeable in the school hierarchy. This took some pressure off their players, lessened the need to find a particular player during the game, and mitigated the risk of a central player being unable to play.
The College of Wizardry design was made possible very much due to the genre and the fiction of the game: the topsy-turvy Harry Potter fiction is forgiving and easygoing, practically the very opposite of the military and naval hierarchies of Celestra. It does not matter if a professor appears a little silly when leaving alchemical ingredients to be easily stolen, or when accepting a spurious excuse for not showing up for class.
Indeed, several professors played to lose by drinking a potion that made everything appear wonderful to them – even the fact that their wonderfully talented students conjured up spirits of the dead and dabbled in unforgivable curses. By removing themselves from the conflict equation, they provided play for people below them in the power hierarchy – such as the group of Auror students left to deal with the issue((The Design Document instructed the staff to stay on the sidelines during the grand opening ball when conflicts started to escalate. However, they were not offered a ready solution on how to do this, and it is debatable whether this instruction was intended as a binding dictate or merely a helpful suggestion.)).
This design, combined with the brilliant 360° illusion of the Czocha castle and the very significant contributions of several players, made the players give the larp rave reviews. Out of the 112 respondents to the evaluation survey, 91% totally or somewhat agreed with the statement “I had a great game”, and an astounding 74%((Players attending their first larp were excluded from this figure.)) of the respondents agreed with “College of Wizardry was my best larp ever”.
The implication of these overwhelmingly positive numbers is not that this was a perfect larp, but that by building on the Celestra, CoW discovered a formula for blockbuster larp: a brute force larp of adventure and escapism, guaranteed to win popular appreciation. The jury is out on whether the new formula can be applied outside the world of Harry Potter, as the disorganized fictional setting of young adult Bildungsroman was an essential part of making it hard to break.
The next, clear step towards improving the formula will be the addition of workshops for character relationships and group dynamics. Indeed, even though the Celestra was already criticized for leaving social relationship development to players’ own internet discussions, College of Wizardry still used the same approach. As a result, the majority of players responding to the evaluation survey expressed their desire for on-site character relationship workshops before the game.
Both of these games would have greatly benefited from just a few hours spent efficiently building relationships and dynamics, and indeed the CoW team will utilize them in the second run of the game.
The Terrific, Terrible Blockbuster Formula
From the late 90s onwards, larp in the Nordic countries (and, increasingly, internationally) has undergone a revolutionary pace of development. By rejecting brute force designs in favour of structural and stylistic innovation, larpwrights have shown that larp can deal with complex and mature themes – from the fraught psychology of intimate relationships to the politics of the Cold War and the social dynamics of the AIDS crisis. The Celestra model combines the traditional brute force larp with inventions from arthaus larp to great effect – perhaps a bit like the Hollywood blockbuster appropriated techniques from popular vaudeville theater and from experimentalists such as Sergei Eisenstein or Fritz Lang. In other words: this is a blockbuster formula for Nordic larp.
The attempts of Celestra and CoW to deal with contemporary politics, such as nationalism and discrimination, were peripheral compared to the action-packed, sometimes thrilling and sometimes comedic events generated by the brute structure. In this regard, these larps were faithful to Battlestar Galactica and Harry Potter that inspired them. While even action movies can find the time to portray compressed emotional and romantic content, in blockbuster larps intimate and serene moments are always in danger of being hit by a stray plot. There might be an unsolvable problem in how to serve the bottom ranks of power hierarchies with enough brute game content without pushing the leaders to steer constantly with both hands full of plot.
While the formula can be improved with techniques such as character relationship workshops, some problems are likely to prove unsolvable: most importantly, the chaotic arrival of competing plot trains is likely to plague these games in the long run.
These risks are inseparable from the sense of action and agency produced by such designs, and must be accepted as such by players and organizers. After all, the blockbuster formula is a formula for an action movie or an HBO drama, not a formula for an accurate documentary or a subtly nuanced performance.
Acknowledgements
A number of players and organizers of The Monitor Celestra and College of Wizardry gave their opinion on this paper prior to publication. Although we did not follow all their suggestions, those discussions significantly improved this text. Above all, however, we are grateful to the teams that organized these two larps.
Ludography
Carolus Rex (1999): Karim Muammar and Martin Ericsson (game design), Tomas Walch and Henrik Summanen (production and dramaturgy), Emma Wieslander (writing), Mathias Larsson, Erik Stormark and Daniel Krauklis (runtime logistics help). Norrköping, Sweden.
College of Wizardry (2014): Szymon “Boruta” Boruta, Dracan Dembinski, Freja Gyldenstrøm, Agnieszka “Linka” Hawryluk- Boruta, Agata “Świstak” Lubańska, Charles Bo Nielsen, Aleksandra Hedere Ososińska, Ida Pawłowicz, Claus Raasted, Dorota Kalina Trojanowska and Mikołaj Wicher, with a team of around 15 helpers. Rollespilsfabrikken and Liveform. Lesna, Poland. http://www.cowlarp.com/
Futuredrome (2002): The Story Lab, Riksteatern, Fabel, Oroboros. Kinnekulle, Sweden.
Hamlet (2002): Martin Ericsson, Christopher Sandberg, Anna Eriksson, Martin Brodén, with a large team. Interaktiva Uppsättningar and riksteatern JAM. Stockholm, Sweden.
Moirais Vev (1997): Eirik Fatland, Lars Wingård, Erlend Eidsem Hansen, Karen Winther, Martin Bull-Gundersen, Andreas Kolle.
Koljonen, J. (2007): Eye-Witness to the Illusion. An Essay on the Impossibility of 360° Role-Playing. In Donnis, J., Gade, M. & Thorup, L. (2007): Lifelike.
Fatland, E. & Wingård, L. (1999): Dogma 99. A Programme for the Liberation of LARP. In Gade, M., Thorup, L. & Sander, M. (eds.) (2003): As Larp Grows Up.
Pohjola, M. (2000): The Manifesto of the Turku School. In Gade, M., Thorup, L. & Sander, M. (eds.) (2003): As Larp Grows Up.
Cover photo: Part of the crew of The Monitor Celestra before the start of the first run, by Johannes Axner, is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Other photos by Johannes Axner from The Monitor Celestra (first run) and College of Wizardry (first run).
The rhetorics of Nordic larp often imply that role-players play in an intuitive fashion guided by the character, rarely or never contemplating their actions during the game. In reality, however, we are often keenly aware of what we are doing as our characters and why. This paper explores the practice of making in-character decisions based on off-game reasons – also known as steering.
In discussions about role-playing, there is a tendency to treat the character as an entity separate from the player. While we need some kind of separation to understand the contextual difference of killing an orc and adjusting a name-tag, this separation also obscures some important processes of roleplaying. As the participants in a larp enact their characters, the choices they make as characters are not always driven by diegetic (in-game) motivation. The rhetorics of immersion, character and coherence would have us believe that characters in role-playing games, at least when played by “good” role-players, do not let extra-diegetic motivation invade the game world.
In the actual practice of roleplaying however, player motivations seep into the game constantly. The player of a tyrant might choose to play in a more benevolent style when interacting with beginners, or a vampire character might leave an interesting scene because the player needs to find the restroom. These are basic examples of steering, of doing things in a game due to the player’s reasons – rather than the character’s.
While the idea of steering complicates some ideals of what players ‘should’ do, we consider it a critical player skill in most larps. We hope that by naming it, we can provide players with a useful tool to discuss their craft.
We define steering as follows:
Steering is the process in which a player influences the behavior of her character for non-diegetic reasons.
In other words, while the player’s character is an entity within a game world, the behavior of a steering player is motivated by reasons outside the game world. To manage this contradiction, steering players almost always attempt to maintain the semblance of coherence in their character’s behavior.
Specifically, players attempt to ensure that characters maintain the outward appearance of coherence for the character’s actions, from the perspective of other characters first and other players second. In other words, a player who is steering strives to maintain the illusion that the actions of her character make sense as a whole.
Whenever possible, players also attempt to maintain the internal coherence of their understanding of the character. In the above example of the vampire player looking for a restroom, the player undoubtedly fails to preserve internal coherence, but she still seeks to maintain the outward appearance of coherence for other players.
Steering is often subtle and nuanced. As an example, the player of a prison guard might be considering whether her character should pursue a love interest or fulfil her character’s guard duties. In deciding that pursuing the love interest will make for a better game, she subtly decides to heed the pull of the romantic interest more strongly, maintaining her internal coherence while actually influencing her play based on a non-diegetic decision on how to generate better play.
By definition, steering is always intentional. Thus, you can never steer by accident, and it requires conscious choice and effort. The behavior in the above example would not have counted as steering if the player was just deeply focused in the romantic affair and would have never considered the effect on the larger game before deserting her post. Instead, she consciously evaluated the impact of her actions, and then acted towards deepening the romance. This can happen quickly and semi-consciously so that the player can stay in the emotional flow that inspired the choice – but it is still a marked moment the player can identify afterwards. Of course, we do steering decisions so often and so quickly that we often forget about them before the larp is over.
Steering can be used to create good or bad play. Usually such definitions depend on the play culture and the overall dynamics of the game: In a gamist aesthetic, playing to win can be seen as acceptable, while in games focusing on a play to lose aesthetic, the players are expected to steer towards failure. Steering can even be immoral or unethical, for example if a player uses her character as a pretence for stalking another player.
Not all character actions result from steering – only those actions intended to guide the character to a specific effect for reasons that exist outside of the character’s conception of the world. At a minimum, we consider the reflexes and unconscious reactions of the player as external to steering. An example of the difficulty of establishing a line between steering and not-steering is player attraction toward other players: If a character’s choice to pursue a romance is influenced by the desire of the player it could be seen as steering – but only if the player is aware of this.
It is also important to note that steering is something one does to one’s own character. There is by definition no such thing as ‘steering others’. However, through steering her own character, the player can also change the way others are playing and influence the direction of the larp as a whole. Indeed, that is often the goal.
Dual Consciousness
We believe that knowing how to steer properly is one of the most important player skills.
Since steering breaks down the division between the player and the character and exposes the moment-to-moment reality of play, it is a useful tool in taking a brutally honest look at what happens in the practice of larp.
Most of the time during larp runtime, players have the dual consciousness of looking at the event both as diegetic, and as non-diegetic, as play and as non-play. This dual consciousness, or bisociation, informs most of their actions. It is an important part of playing and games; standing with one foot within the border of play and another outside it can not only be powerful, but also instructive.
Viewing something both as play and as non-play not only teaches the viewer about the thing she is looking at, but about the overall structure. This helps in understanding the socially constructed nature of reality as a whole, but specifically it helps in understanding how a game functions. This competence at reading situations on multiple levels is a skill that can be developed in play and applied when steering.
Steering Examples
Practical
Physical needs. Food, sleep, warmth, etc. Looking for someone. Searching for another player to play a scene or to get the car keys. Documentation. Posing for or avoiding a camera. Filming in characer. Logistics. Entering hostile territory because that is where the toilet is. Physical safety. Not running in the pitch-black forest even when your pursuers do.
Smooth Play
Coherence. Preserving the external coherence, even at the expense of your internal coherence. Legibility. Overplaying emotions to make sure they are conveyed to other players. Game mastering and fateplay. Pushing the game towards some direction as required by larp design. Retrospective rationalization. Smoothing over the plot holes of earlier bad steering. Post-hoc player vetting. Mitigating the perceived damage to the game caused by a ‘bad’ player. Theme. Accepting that vampires are real in two minutes.
Aesthetic Ideals
Narrativism and dramatism. Making a better story for yourself or others. Gamism. Winning conflicts, gathering power. Immersionism. Avoiding heavy game mechanics that might detract from character immersion. Bleed. Seeking maximally intense emotional impact. 360° illusion. Avoiding the sight of the parking lot in fantasy games. Play to lose. Sharing secrets loudly for eavesdroppers to hear them.
Personal Experience
Boredom. Looking for stuff to do. Picking up fights. Staying in game. Not leaving the haunted mansion even when two people are dead. Relevance. Getting closer to the perceived core of the game, or seeking more agency. Overcoming disabling design. Deciding that your character wants to become a revolutionary only after you realize that most characters only talk to revolutionaries. Avoiding the same-old. Not rebelling against the tyrant in two games in a row. Attraction. Getting to play with skilled or cool players. Player status. Doing things likely to increase one’s status as a player. Shame. Not wanting to do or to be seen doing certain things, even as a character.
Ethical and Unethical
Consent. Observing a slow-down safeword such as “yellow” or “brems”. Trust. Creating a safe situation in which to play demanding scenes. Inclusiveness. Including characters that have nothing to do at that moment. Harassment. Using the larp to stalk another player. Revenge. Killing your character because you killed mine in an earlier game.
There is nothing mysterious about this process. It simply means that a player is able to see at the same time both the cheerful friend who gave her a lift to the larp wearing old army surplus clothes, and the frightful commander of the space station her character could never approach. Both of these things are true at the same time. Recognizing the difference between the diegetic and the non-diegetic is the difference roleplaying is built upon. However, that separation is not actual, but rather one made in interpretation.
The idea that one realm, the non-diegetic, is allowed to influence the other realm, the diegetic, may seem wrong, even immoral. Indeed, the idea of steering may seem like anathema to roleplaying. Is not the key tenet of roleplaying the idea of portraying a fictional being in a fictional setting – without the petty motivations a player may have outside roleplaying? Yet steering is not a bad or an undesirable thing to do. In fact, many players steer almost all the time when they are playing. The diegetic world of fantasy never maps completely on the physical world, nor does the body of the player completely become that of the character. The draw of larp is that it is not-real and that it feels real.
Steering and Immersionism
The concept of steering – and the criticism of motivations originating with the player – emerge from a tradition that values character immersion as an ideal. Immersion is perhaps most frequently defined as moments when player forgets herself – when the dual consciousness of simultaneously being a player and a character fades away and player only focuses on being her character. This experience has been characterized, for example, as the player pretending to believe that she is her character (Pohjola 2004) and as bracketing the everyday self (Fine 1983).
It has been compared to ideas such as flow (Hopeametsä 2008) and wilful suspension of disbelief (Pohjola 2004).
In the Manifesto of the Turku School, Mike Pohjola (2000) argued that character immersion should be seen as the ideal aesthetic of the larp. But with an ideology that forbids dual consciousness comes some baggage – it prohibits steering:
Sometimes it might be fun to do something that is not in strict accordance with the character, but – unless the GM has specifically asked you to do so – THAT IS FORBIDDEN.
The psychological idealism focused on immersion has faded since the turn of the millennium. It is now commonly acknowledged in the Nordic larp discourse that even when player’s focus is on her character she still does not become the character. The idea that someone could use character immersion as a moral justification for punching another player in the face would universally be found ridiculous.
But even as full character immersion has been found impossible, this rhetoric of playing true to the character has persisted. The dogma of character fidelity can be seen whenever players discuss whether it is realistic that the king fell in love with the peasant girl, or whether it was credible that mortal enemies joined forces in order to win the war against orcs.
However, as the player cannot psychologically transform into her character, the problem of Pohjola’s statement is that it is impossible to determine which actions are in “strict accordance with the character”. Even as a player, one can determine several credible courses of action for almost any situation the character can be in.
This uncertainty and ambiguity about what would be fitting for a character is what makes steering possible. If there was always one right choice for a character to make, steering would be meaningless. It is this very uncertainty that is the site for steering – the minute choices a character makes. Steering is rarely about making major life choices and often about pushing a discussion gently in a new direction.
Indeed, the skill in question is not entirely dissimilar to the skills one needs when steering conversation away from difficult topics in an everyday social situation like a polite chat with colleagues over coffee. When you understand that you have a potentially inappropriate joke that is perfect for the situation, you still decide whether or not to tell it. Sometimes that decision may be done very quickly, subtly, or half-unconsciously.
The strict reading of immersionism presented above appears to be incompatible with the idea of steering. However, contemporary immersionists do not argue that character immersion is an overwhelming and persistent state. Rather, it is seen as an aesthetic ideal and a goal to strive for when playing.
From this perspective, we actually argue that some amount of steering is even a requirement for immersionist play. The immersionist player seeks to ignore and forget the fact she is larping while doing so. This wilful suspension of disbelief requires the player to maintain internal coherence of her character: It might be hard to forget yourself and become a medieval queen if you are standing on the balcony with the clear view to the parking lot. Getting a powerful immersionist experience of committing a tragic suicide is more likely if you consciously choose to commit one.
Or, as Pohjola wrote himself years later:
Whenever we see interesting developments that will enhance our story, our experience and our character immersion, we have to jump at the chance to engage with them. Otherwise we’re not doing anyone any favors. In a larp you should be your own game master and help your own character immersion by building a better game for yourself.
The reason why the idea of steering is sometimes seen to be at odds with The Manifesto of the Turku School is probably historical. It was written at a time when player motivations were seen to be influencing Finnish roleplaying too much.
Although it was a response to Dogma 99 (Fatland & Wingård 1999), it was actually directed against gamism (steering to win), dramatism (steering to create interesting scenes and stories), and bad roleplaying (for example, steering on the expense of coherence).
The idea of steering shows how rare moments of real immersion and flow are. By lifting the dogmatic ways of talking about the play experience tinted with the idea of immersion, it helps account for many of the actions a player takes during runtime. By shifting emphasis from the ideals of playing to the actual practice it illuminates what we really do while roleplaying.
Designing for Steering
The idea that larps contain characters that are there to direct the play is as old as larping itself. This is what the non-player characters and other game master controlled actors have been doing since the beginning of larping (cf. Stenros 2013). However, player characters have done this since the beginning as well – even if it was not always directly discussed.
Explicit steering instructions have been a part of the tradition of Nordic larps at least since the emergence of fateplay (see Fatland 2005), a style of making larps where players are given some instructions on how to behave in certain situations – the character Claudius, for example, was fated to die in the larp Hamlet (2002).
More recently, larps such as The Monitor Celestra (2013) have introduced the idea of having large amounts of characters with pervasive and persistent steering duties. In the Celestra, which featured strict naval and military hierarchies, higher-ranking officers were expected to generate play for their subordinates. For example, the commanding officer of the Colonial Navy was instructed as follows:
As the Major in charge, your foremost duty is to act as a game master for bridge and CIC personnel, generating interesting play and putting flavor into the tasks of running the ship […] Always keep in mind that your job isn’t to be an effective Major, but to be a good player/game master, and enable interesting action for others.
Character material, The Monitor Celestra
While all players had similar duties, the higher the character was in a hierarchy, the stronger the expectation of steering was. This was of course a practical solution: By having the Major to steer hard the game masters could alter the course of the entire larp, as she could use her diegetic authority to impact the game for all her subordinates, shielding them from the need to steer.
This mechanic worked rather well for members of those hierarchies, especially compared to older and more selfish play styles (see Fatland & Montola in this book for a detailed discussion).
Although the top brass was expected to steer the most, Celestra explicitly encouraged following the philosophy of play to lose, which basically expects everyone to steer in the larp. The following play instruction was given under the heading “Rules” in the briefing materials:
You are expected to play to lose, prettily. In a game where experiencing the journey is the whole point, winning is moronic. Losing, on the other hand, is dramatic and cool since it puts a spin on the story and contributes to emotional impact.
The Monitor Celestra Briefing
These games have established a new steering norm along the ones such as gamism, dramatism, immersionism and bleed: In these games, players are expected to steer in order to play to lose. This anti-gamist stance can arguably contribute to many other play aesthetics, as it “puts a spin on the story” for dramatists and “contributes to emotional impact” for immersionists and bleedhunters.
Obligatory and Heavy Steering
Sometimes it is every larper’s obligation to steer. Barring some unusual arrangement, role-players share an almost universal implicit obligation to steer for coherence. Different game styles have different conceptions of what coherence is, yet internal logic of some kind is valued in all larp cultures.
In some roleplaying games, especially larger larps with less-tightly organized plots, what would be seen as a significant coherence conflict in another game may be glossed over by all players concerned as they acknowledge tacitly that a conflict has occurred by choosing not to fix it, as it would require too much work on the part of disparate groups of players.
In other games, often smaller or more tightly plotted, it would be seen as a serious problem for such a breach of coherence to occur to start with, requiring either heavy steering by all parties to fix immediately or possibly (in some play cultures) a break of play so the ‘truth’ of the situation can be decided directly by the players off-game. Usually, when coherence cannot be achieved by steering, the next solution is to ignore the problem; to steer play away from the mess.
Two examples can help clarify this. In long-running campaigns the character arcs can become increasingly improbable. Like in soap operas and superhero comics, certain ancient acts may be de-emphasized by those character’s players.
In larps this works particularly well, as no one can go back in time three years to check and nitpick what actually and specifically happened. In larps that use them, mechanics like experience points can also shift balances between masters and apprentices or parents and children, if players put in different amounts of play time.
Another example comes from the second run of The Monitor Celestra, where at one point the key to the hyperdrive was stolen, and a dozen characters got involved in recovering it from the characters who used it as leverage in a negotiation. Problems arose because the game organizers held that no such key existed, as some player had improvised it up. As the characters raced to solve the issue the gamemasters ignored it; as far as they were concerned, this plot did not exist.
The game masters could still not solve the problem simply by issuing a decree, because too many characters were involved with the key.
In the end the issue was solved twice in the game – once very rapidly due to game master pressure and again by some characters not being aware of the first time – and only then were all the characters able to move on. No equifinal understanding on what actually happened can be produced.
When characters are forced to steer hard, it causes wider ripples in the play. Specifically, one player steering hard may leave another player confused about the steerer’s character’s identity, her relationship with the second player’s character, or the events of the larp. This is sometimes unavoidable, especially when a player is forced to steer in a character-breaking way. This is a specific kind of game incoherence associated with steering that many players, especially heavily immersionist players, may consider unacceptable.
Steering can be characterized as character-breaking steering when the player cannot maintain her internal sense of coherence. For example, if the player is executing a game master directive that is important for the larger plot of a game but finds their character has moved away from the gamemasters’ expectations of who they would be when the instructions were originally specified, they will need to steer their character to ensure they fulfill their obligations to the game, but will do so knowing that this action does not make sense for the character.
Likewise, a player may realize part-way through a game that they have played themselves into a corner, and if they wish to continue playing or return to the main plot of the game, they will have to simply reinvent part of their character. While to be character-breaking, this shift need only be incoherent to the player, when done poorly (or under extreme circumstances) it will often result in the character also appearing incoherent to other players.
In order to repair the disruption created by heavy steering, players sometimes engage in retroactive rationalization, wherein they decide on the thus far unvoiced rationale for choices they have already made to maintain the appearance of coherence. For instance, a player who forgot their character’s sidearm may later steer, deciding that their character was feeling especially secure that morning, and thought they would not need it.
If the player discovers that this will cause a coherence problem with other players expectations, they may engage in retroactive rationalization retconning – if they have not already told the other players, they can changing their prior retroactive rationalization. In this example, the player might decide that instead of being supremely confident, their sidearm was actually stolen, allowing them to integrate with a game mood of suspicion and paranoia.
The roleplay agreement (Sihvonen 1997), the social contract that participants treat the player and the character as separate entities and refrain from making judgement about one based on the other, is a cornerstone of roleplaying. Without it establishing trust amongst players to also engage in anti-social behaviors, like playing a villain, can be hard. The concept of steering does not obliterate the role-play agreement. However, it needs to be modified; the separation need not be between player and character, but diegesis and non-play. Indeed, it is the character that acts as an alibi for steering. The player can choose what she wants to do or what best fits the larp, and as long as it somehow makes sense in relation to the facts of the character thus far established, it is acceptable.
Conclusion
Sensitivity to other players – knowing when and how to steer – is a key player skill. A considerate player can create play for others, pace drama, include others players, support beginners, and avoid hogging plots and secrets. A good larper steers in a nuanced way that is invisible to other players and does not damage the coherence of play. Steering is not a bad thing to do in a game, and most of us steer much of the time while we are playing.
Just like good steering contributes to the game, refusal to steer can detract from it. If one player does not steer, her fellow players may be forced to steer even harder to sustain the game. It is not rare to encounter a selfish player in a larp with a preference to avoid steering who expects other players to accommodate her play style. The other players may end up steering hard to maintain play and allow her to preserve the immersive flow instead of caring about the overall game.
Steering is a skill and not all players are good at it. Steering coherently and reliably requires thinking and performing simultaneously on two, three, or more levels while maintaining an accurate model of both the perceptions of both other characters and their players.
Players holding on to an ideal of playing entirely without dual consciousness may even argue that the expectation of steering ruins their game. Steering is perceived by some players as distancing them from their character. In part, the degree of distance perceived may relate to how quickly players are able to slip between different levels of play.
It is not necessarily the case that more intense emotional experiences require less movement between levels of player consideration, but this appears to be true for some players. Some players and some game contracts may consider steering to be cheating, as in those contexts, only diegetic concerns are considered to be acceptable as motivations for player choices. We believe that such contracts are often self-deceptive, and that acknowledgement of the role of steering in play is critical to designing for character immersion in the context of a coherent, functional game.
Acknowledgements
We would especially want to thank Juhana Pettersson as well as other organizers and participants of Larpwriters’ Winter Retreat 2014.
Ludography
Hamlet (2002): Martin Ericsson, Christopher Sandberg, Anna Eriksson, Martin Brodén, with a large team. Interaktiva Uppsättningar and riksteatern JAM. Stockholm, Sweden.
Dansey, N., Stevens, B. & Eglin, R. (2009): Contextually-Ambiguous Pervasive Games: An Exploratory Study, Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory. Proceedings of DiGRA 2009. Sept 1-4, 2009, West London, United Kingdom.
Stenros, J. (2013): Between Game Facilitation and Performance: Interactive Actors and Non-Player Characters in Larps. International Journal of Role-Playing, No 4, 78-95.
Sihvonen, T. (1997): Pieni johdatus live-roolipelaamisen psykologiaan, in Vainio, N. (ed.): Larppaajan käsikirja. Suomen live-roolipelaajat, Tampere.
Steering is the process in which a player influences the behavior of her character for non-diegetic reasons.
The concept of character immersion has been a cornerstone of Nordic larp discussion for fifteen years. I was surprised by how much the concept of steering introduced last year brought to my understanding of character immersion (“eläytyminen”). In this essay I look at five specific experiences with steering towards immersion, some successful, some not.
More specifically, I have usually tried to steer towards immersing in cathartic emotional experiences experiences through my character. Most often this has come through experiencing Saturnine melancholy.
The character immersion definition I work with here is this one:
Immersion is the player assuming the identity of the character by pretending to believe their identity only consists of the diegetic roles.
Steering is the process in which a player influences the behavior of her character for non-diegetic reasons.
That is, out-of-character motivations guide the character in some direction. In my case, the out-of-character motivation is that of delving deeper in the character, and guiding the character towards experiencing strong emotions.
Saturnine Melancholy
When watching movies, I’m most typically moved to tears when the scene deals with generations passing, time moving on, sons becoming fathers, mothers becoming grandmothers, hints of new babies eventually becoming unrecognized names on graves.
I’ve heard this feeling is called “Saturnine melancholy”, as in melancholy related to time; from the Roman time god Saturn who eats his own son.
Scenes like the one in The Thirteenth Warrior, where the vikings going to battle recite: Lo there do I see the line of my people, back to the beginning. Lo, they do call me, they bid me take my place among them.
Or the wedding scene in Fiddler on the Roof, where they sing Sunrise, Sunset: Is this the little girl I carried? / Is this the little boy at play? / I don’t remember growing older. / When did they?
Why I am particularly prone to Saturnine melancholy is perhaps a topic for another essay. But I have experienced it enough times to know to steer for it.
Käpälämäki X – Kesäyö
The Käpälämäki series is a Harry Potter larp series set at the uncanonical Finnish magic school Käpälämäki. I attended the tenth episode.
My character was Severi Saraste, a bureaucrat from a well known family of dark magic users. He wanted nothing to do with his family, but knew his job and connections depended on them.
Severi’s job in the larp was to be part of a Ministry envoy overseeing the Käpälämäki school and to make sure the Pureblood kids in the school had everything they needed.
During the course of the larp, Severi and some students were imprisoned by Aurors (magic police) because of their ties to a secret cabal of pureblood extremists.
After a few hours the students were released. Neither Saraste nor the conspirator students had said anything. The immersion was mostly to the situation of being in a damp cellar, being interrogated, trying not to be found out. Exciting, but not exactly cathartic.
Saraste was moved to the attic and left alone to ponder upon his actions.
After a while of sitting alone in the attic, I noticed my thoughts started to drift away from the larp, into matters of real-life work, family, art, food, and so on. I was running out of inner monologue for my character! I had to steer my larp ship out of these low shoals into the high seas of immersion! But I had no chart.
I pulled out my Finnish-style lengthy character description detailing Severi’s childhood, contacts, plots, background, dilemmas, tasks, everything. I figured I would have hours to sit alone, so I read it with care.
Severi only has two choices, neither of which are appealing: he can leave the pureblood extremists and gain freedom but lose everything else, or continue as before, and remain a prisoner of his community.
But wait… Was he actually offered a third choice now? Come clean to the Aurors, and rat out his whole family? They would go to prison and have no power over Severi Saraste or his career anymore. But did Severi have it in him?
This was just the sort of emotional hook I was hoping to find by re-reading the character description. It provided the lengthy alone time with the perfect inner monologue. Severi stared out the window, thinking about what to do. On the one hand, this, on the other hand, that…
And then the in-game radio started playing a sad wizarding jazz song downstairs. Severi could just hear the melodramatic tone, and then the tears came. After I had enough of crying, Severi demanded to see the Aurors again.
“I wish to change my statement.”
“In what way?”
“I want to confess.”
After that the game took a whole new direction for myself and for many other players, including the Aurors and the other conspirators.
I had not planned for this in any way, and neither had the character writer Lissu Ervasti. But by chance, steering, and character immersion, I received the full Aristotelian experience. First, an insoluble dilemma (act one), getting into trouble because of it (act two), then a recognition of some inner truth (anagnorisis), and a complete turn of direction (peripeteia), resulting in an outcome that at first would ha ve seemed impossible (act three). (See also Pohjola, 2003)
The immersive experience would have been just as strong without the turning point, but in this case it happened to serve as fuel for more game content.
Monitor Celestra
Monitor Celestra was a big Swedish larp set in the world of the reimagined TV series Battlestar Galactica. The larp was set in the time of the pilot episode, where almost all mankind has just been destroyed by the Cylon machines. Only a handful of spaceships survived and formed a fleet, which included both the military museum ship Galactica, political ship Colonial One, and the research vessel Celestra.
I played the surgeon on board the Celestra, Dr. P. Albert. (The larp was played three times, and all characters were non-gendered. I named myself Pavel.)
The written character mostly consisted of group briefs, like Cultural Affiliation: Tauron, Group: Celestra Crew, Subgroup: Medical Staff, and Other Affiliations: Cylon Sympathizers.
Before the group briefs I had a small chapter summarizing my character as a Cylon loving doctor. Then at the bottom of the description this Cylon loving doctor idea was extrapolated and imbued with playing directions, and out-of-character duties (such as determining the severity of wounds and illnesses).
The Cylon loving doctor might seem like a fun character to play, but in the actual larp, the understandable lack of cylons and limited space for medical practice made this almost irrelevant. So I was left with very little of the pre-made material being useful.
We were told to flesh out the characters ourselves, as is quite often the case in Swedish and Danish larps. In Finnish larps the larp design is communicated mostly through the characters, so the “make your own character” style seems strange even for me after a decade and a half of larping abroad.
In this case we were given a forum, and told to develop inter-character relations there. Fine.
I fleshed out my character by giving him a wife and family on one of the planets that was destroyed. I made Dr. Pavel Albert a long-haired hippie with a California drawl in his speech to very clearly mark him a civilian and thus contrast him further with the military personnel I knew would be manning the Celestra at some point.
I decided P. Albert had worked on the Celestra to pay his med school loans, but was now almost done with it, and would get to return to Tauron next week. And I developed some low-key relationships with other players, but unfortunately nothing that would become truly essential in the larp. And, assuming this was a sandbox type larp, I decided the character would try to take over the ship from the eventual military occupation, if push came to shove.
Like the Cylon loving doctor description, all of these, too, became void in the course of the larp. I ended up having to do a lot of impromptu steering in order to get something out of the larp.
The aftermath of humanity being destroyed would have been perfect material for character immersion, and even Saturnine melancholy: I am the last member of my family. My wife has just died. My parents had died. 99.99+ % of humanity has died. But during the course of the game (as of the TV pilot), we would be given new hope of a secret thirteenth colony of mankind: Earth.
Unfortunately most of this emotional potential was made void by the heavy emphasis on action plots, and the breaks in the game.
The game was divided into four acts, with a break between each. Sometimes the break was short, at other times we would leave the location for the hostel. There was always a time leap for the characters. Fine. But the dramatic structure that works for television, does not always work for larps: the big information with the potential emotional impact (“Earth exists!”) was always delivered at the very end of the act. Meaning that we never got to play characters reacting to them.
Similar problems prevented focus on the “everyone you knew is dead” aspect of the setting.
There were plots elements in the larp, too. Is the ship controlled by the original civilian crew or the military visitors? What side is the Presidential representative on? Does Celestra contact the Cylon ship or the refugee ship? Do we have Cylons onboard?
I do not know how well these “main plots” worked in other runs of the larp, but in the second one that I attended, the whole system was unfortunately broken (see also The Blockbuster Formula). A bunch of players who had contributed to the larp via crowdfunding and made the whole thing possible were promised a “special plot,” which turned out to be that they were all members of a secret spy organization.
Their characters were then divided into various groups in high positions, meaning they essentially controlled most of the main plots. During the course of the larp I realized it was not built like the sandbox I expected, and the main plots seemed strangely impenetrable.
What was left was more like an amusement park, and I started steering in that direction to get some enjoyment out of it.
It worked like this: Dr. Pavel Albert went to a location, event or person (such as the AI lab, the bridge, the mutiny, the murder, the Presidential Aide, or the Cylon prisoner), and interacted with everyone as much as possible.
When the situation had exhausted its dramatic potential, he went to a new location. This was most apparent when interacting with GM-played supporting characters, such as the Cylon prisoner. Eventually dialogue with the prisoner started to repeat itself, like talking to non-player characters in a video game.
These emergency steering maneuvers eventually lead to meaningful, emotional content, too, as Dr. Albert, the Presidential Aide (played in a wonderfully enabling manner by Christopher Sandberg), and a few others started hatching a plan to steal a shuttle and flee from Celestra together.
Halat Hisar
Halat hisar was set in an alternate reality where the Palestinian situation had happened in Finland. The fictional Ugric people had been given parts of Finland, and had conquered even more. Many Finns lived under occupation in “South Coast” (corresponding to West Bank) or the Åland Islands (corresponding to Gaza Strip). It was played in Parkano in November 15–17, 2013, and organized by a Palestinian-Finnish team.
The larp was set at the Finnish University of Helsinki, in divided Helsinki. My character Tuomas Kallo, described as “The Conflicted Realist,” was running for the head of the student council as one of the Social Democratic Liberation Party (“Fatah”) candidates. Other parties were the Party of Christ (“Hamas”), Pan-Nordic Liberation Front, and the Socialist Resistance Front.
My dramatic function was explained in the character description: “You represent the establishment, and through you, maybe the radical roots of today’s ruling party can be seen.” In this reading I was essentially a younger, Finnish version of Mahmoud Abbas, the President of the Palestinian Authority.
Early on in the larp soldiers from the Ugric Defense Forces occupied the university and placed it under curfew. Students and faculty were arrested, interrogated and tortured. During the larp rumors started spreading that my character was somehow in league with the UDF, perhaps giving them information. It was impossible to refute such accusations, but they essentially cost Tuomas Kallo the election and some friendships.
The big turning point, and cause of emotional turmoil for Tuomas Kallo was a student demonstration against the UDF soldiers. I took the megaphone and lead the group in singing nationalist songs. Some people yelled slogans, others threw stones.
The other megaphone was held by a fellow candidate, the Socialist Marie Isola (played by Jamie MacDonald). She was the de facto leader of the demonstration, and got into a shouting match with one of the soldiers.
Things got aggressive, and the UDF soldier shot Marie.
Somebody called the ambulance, which drove towards the demonstration, but was held by the soldiers at the road block, and then forbidden to get close to the bleeding student. When the medical professionals eventually got to Marie, she was already dead. After the larp we found out this was all pre-written by the organizers.
Marie’s death was such a blow that it effectively ended the demonstration. We went back to the university building, everyone full of emotions: sadness, shock, bitterness, anger, fear…
I was ready to let the emotions wash over me. It was time to steer towards Saturnine melancholy!
For that, I found the perfect Turku-style location for solitary immersion: a lookout tower with a very small room on the top, and in every direction windows to the blackness that is Finnish November. There was even one chair there. Just one, as if it was designed for being alone. Perhaps it was.
I stared out the window into the dramatic darkness, seeing soldiers marching on the campus. How horrible…
Had I chosen the right path? Would we avenge Marie? Would we hold a vigil for her? Should I be more radical? What would my father have done, had he not been killed by UDF soldiers? Perfect Saturnine melancholic material for emotional immersion.
But then I, the player, remembered something! This larp used the Black Box technique, and I had decided to try that. I imagined the emotional potential triggered by Marie’s death would be prime material for Black Boxing, so I took the wheel, made a quick U turn, and walked the stairs down to the Black Box room.
Unfortunately the Black Box was taken. Many players had scenes to play with Marie: flashback, dreams, “what could have beens”, and so on. Marie’s player would soon play something else, so all this had to be done now. Mohamad Rabah, the Game Master in charge of the Black Box, asked me to wait.
This called for complex steering: I had to hold on to the emotional potential but not tap into it. To do this, I walked around the building trying to avoid any contact with others who might inflict me with dialogue or plots that would dilute the emotional potential.
Eventually I made it to the Black Box and played a dream sequence where Mohamad played Tuomas Kallo’s father. After plenty of “What would you do, dad?” and “My son, you already know what you have to do” we concluded the scene. I found it difficult to fully utilize the emotional potential I had come in with, perhaps because I lacked mechanisms for steering Mohamad, or because Mohamad had some other aim with the Black Box scene.
Some time after the Black Box scene we held a small memorial event for Marie. We raised the Finnish flag, sung some sad songs about how we join our ancestors in Heaven and one day, we, too, will fade from memory. That was what finally made Tuomas Kallo (and me) cry.
KoiKoi
KoiKoi was a larp about stone-age hunter-gatherers played in Norway on July 1 – 5, 2014. The larp was played in numerous Scandinavian languages, and us Finns played strangers from a neighboring tribe who had become humans, that is, members of this tribe. My character Duskregn was a loincloth-wearing warrior married into the Bear Family.
The larp was only a little about any single character’s individual dilemmas and dramas, and quite a lot about the society going about its business. Children becoming men, women and nuk, young men and women traded to other families to bear new children, and the old dying and being remembered. It should have been a perfect opportunity for some Saturnine melancholy, but somehow I never got there.
All the instances of transformation were ritualized, which made perfect sense for the larp and could easily have added to the atmosphere. So we had a ManRit for children becoming men, a KvinnRit for children becoming women, a NukRit for children becoming nuk, a DödsRit for old people dying, a MinnsRit for remembering those who had died after the previous KoiKoi meeting, and several family rites for leaving one family and joining another. Some families even had washing rites and such.
Between all those rituals and the getting ready for them, the content of my larp was mostly about hanging with my family, sleeping with people from other families, and dancing and telling stories in the big tent-like house.
In a modern-day larp I would have brought a book for my character to read during downtime. In this case, the storytelling took that part.
I listened to stories, performed in stories, and told stories of my own. As a professional writer coming up with stories is something I enjoy doing, and I am quite experienced at it. Unfortunately I ended up steering too much into coming up with stories for others to hear, instead of steering for getting everything out of whatever situation I was in.
Most of the time I didn’t realize this was a problem, until after the larp. But after the MinnsRit where we remembered the dead, and everybody told stories about their loved ones, I was disappointed to not have really felt it.
All the elements were there: generations passing, everyone having lost their loved ones, us becoming aware of our mortality and of the fact that others will eventually take our place and tell stories of us. We even had a few ancestors (nuks with masks) watching us. It should have been a cry-fest for me, but it was not.
During the MinnsRit I spent too much brain-power on trying to come up with a story to tell. I was a recent addition to the AnKoi, but maybe I’d killed one of them earlier when I was still a Stranger. That might be a powerful, emotional twist. But who, and how? And why did they only die now? Or are there actually too many stories, and it’s getting kind of boring, and it takes too long to get through the mandatory memories without me adding new ones?
What I should have done is steer for experiencing this full on, seeing us in the millennial line of people coming there to hear memories, share memories, and become memories. It is possible that due to my character’s outsider and barely developed past, I lacked points in which to attach such emotions.
At times during the larp I felt not as my character but only as myself as a hunter-gatherer. Then I tried to figure out a more complex personality or back-story for my character. Maybe I was a spy from the strange tribe who was examining this tribe for weaknesses to exploit.
One of the designers of KoiKoi, Eirik Fatland, has spoken about how Aragorn in the Prancing Pony would be a horrible character, since he would have no connection to any of the other characters, or the plots amongst the other visitors. But he would have an inner monologue Fatland parodizes as
I am Aragorn, I am so cool. I am Aragorn, I am so cool…
Fatland, 2014
An inner monologue of that kind would ha ve been preferable to having no inner monologue at all.
For me KoiKoi was a very powerful experience and an excellent larp, but in this sense a failure in steering for emotional immersion.
College of Wizardry
College of Wizardry was a Danish-Polish larp played November 13 – 16, 2014, at Czocha Castle in Poland. The larp was set at a magic university in Harry Potter world, almost twenty years after the books.
I played Bombastus Bane, Professor of Dark Arts. Defence Against the Dark Arts, I mean. Essentially the Snape of Czocha. The professor characters were more or less created by the players themselves, but the organizers were quick to react to our ideas about contacts and plots.
Bane’s whole family (mother, father, wife) had been in the wizard prison Azkaban since the war portrayed in the books. Bane’s wife had been pregnant at the time of imprisonment, and had given birth to their son Vladimir in prison. Vladimir had grown up in Azkaban surrounded by Dementors and criminals.
Friday at lunch Bane received a letter informing him that his wife had passed away at Azkaban. I realized this is prime material for heavy emotions washing over me, and immediately steered towards this. I left the dining room for the Dark Forest in order to wallow in these emotions alone. Very Turku School. While I was in the Dark Forest, I realized the playing style of this larp would actually benefit from me making this as public as possible, and decided to make a steering turnabout.
I returned to the dining hall to attack the Auror Bane assumed to be responsible for killing his wife. The private emotion became a public spectacle. Essentially this meant that I suppressed the emotional potential in the death of Bane’s wife, and created a dramatic scene instead. A scene, which would later on bring more emotional potential to be explored.
When the immediate conflict was resolved the Auror took Bane to a private location, and explained what had happened.
“Professor Bane, your wife didn’t die naturally. She was killed.”
“By whom?”
“By your son Vladimir.”
Horrible news for Bane, but great material for emotional immersion! He was very distraught, but didn’t cry his heart out, yet.
What finally broke Bane’s heart (and mine) was the Sorting Ceremony on the evening of that day. Looking at all the new juniors walking to their houses, and being cheered, Bane suddenly realised Vladimir was nineteen, and this year he would have been a junior.
My thoughts briefly touched on this idea while observing the Sorting. It immediately triggered a strong, sad emotion. The kind of emotion one normally steers away from in real life. But a larp is a safe space for experiencing them, so I steered right into it. One never knows what one finds when exploring these subconscious emotional triggers, but in this case, my larp ship crashed into an island of gold!
I started thinking that if Vladimir hadn’t grown up in Azkaban he would have been sorted into House Faust, and Bane would have been so proud. Or sorted into some other house, and Bane would have had petty arguments with his son.
And Vladimir would be so excited about all those student crushes and initiation rituals and all the ordinary life of the nineteen-year-old wizard. Which would never happen.
And maybe his mother Miranda would have been there on the balcony with Bane watching him. Which would never happen.
I cried in and off for an hour about this, first looking down at the ceremony, then afterwards when a student witch took Bane aside and he poured his heart out to her.
Even though the larp College of Wizardry itself was far from tragic or sad, it provided the backdrop for a great experience of cathartic Saturnine melancholy.
Conclusion
Steering is a very useful way for a player to analyze their behavior after the larp. By understanding the idea behind steering, the player can also realize when they are doing it during the larp, and it can make it steering easier, and more fruitful.
Steering does not need to happen in speech or actions, it can also happen inside the player, guiding for more interesting thoughts.
I have given five examples of trying to steer towards emotional experiences within character immersion. Some of them were successful, some not: and in the case of Monitor Celestra, I had to abandon that goal mid-game, and steer for something else.
Only the two last larps mentioned (KoiKoi and College of Wizardry) happened after the introduction of the concept of steering. The concept allowed me to better understand even the larps I had played before it: but in the case of College of Wizardry, I remember actively thinking about steering as I was doing it.
Mike Pohjola (2004): Autonomous Identities – Immersion as a Tool For Exploring, Empowering and Emancipating Identities, in Beyond Role and Play, 2004, ed. Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola.
Ludography
Helinä Nurmonen, et al (2012): Käpälämäki. Finland.
Thanks to it I turned my communist friend into a patriot. And I realized who I really am. This is how a respondent, according to Mochocki (2012), described the Polish tabletop role-playing game Dzikie Pola (“Wild Planes”) in an online survey. The game was set in a period of Polish history dating to 1569 – 1795, and it apparently spawned a vibrant larp scene dedicated to re-enactment.
The era is referred to as the Sarmatian period, and Mochocki appears to see it as a golden past central to all Polish culture. He gives the quote in a positive tone, to portray the “liminal quality” of the experience of “sarmatization” that the players had when living a nationalist construction in the games and related activities.
In larp, the asymmetric power relation between the “authors” and the “audience” seems to manifest more concretely than, say, in cinema. One (but by no means the only) difference is that film spectators rarely discuss their experience with the directors.
However, the contact between organizers and players does not usually end when a larp does. Much of the “sarmatization” described by Mochocki happened outside the actual game events. Often larp organizers have an active role in post-game discussions, which can change the player experience after the game.
In System Danmarc (2005), a game set in a cyberpunk future, the players experienced living in a slum. At the end of the game, they were shown a documentary where real-life Danish prostitutes, drug addicts, homeless people, researchers and social workers talked about social exclusion and inequality. It turned out that there were people in Copenhagen already living the future dystopia.
According to Munthe-Kaas (2010), one player described the film as follows:
I was ready to cry watching it. I wanted to help all those people. Because my character was that way, only now the filter was gone, and it was me wanting to help.
Munthe-Kaas writes:
Generally the ending was received very well and many participants afterwards mentioned the film as a central part of their experience. On the other hand, some participants found the ending to be manipulative and politically colored.
A different example is provided by De tusen rosornas väg (2000) (“Road of the Thousand Roses”). It was a medieval fantasy larp about a war between two nations. On one side, the players sang battle songs provided by the organizers, which created a strong patriotic feeling. At the end of the game, the organizers revealed that the songs were in fact translated from the Hitler Jugend songbook and that many other aspects of the game fiction were also adopted from Nazi Germany.
Apparently, some of the participants were quite upset by the announcement. But many also said they had come to a whole new understanding of Nazi Germany. (Englund, 2013, p. 44; see also Fatland, 2011)
In both cases, revealing the connection to reality reframed the larp experience. Perhaps the players felt that the fiction they had collectively created was taken away from them. We met a similar phenomenon with our game Halat hisar (2013). It was set in a fictional occupied Finland that mirrored real-world Palestine. The players knew this beforehand, but some of them were troubled by the way the correspondence to reality was treated in post-game discussions.
One player brought up the feeling of not being in control of her/his experience anymore.
One aspect that made the game feel real and intense was that we had Palestinian players. Their presence served as a reminder that the occupation really existed. After the game, many players wanted to know which parts of the fiction were based on reality and which were made up. Upon their request, I wrote a text that clarified the connections and provided references. We put it up on the website. According to some players, this greatly helped the processing.
Games Without Agenda?
It is sometimes argued that larps should not have a political agenda or that political topics should be treated in a “neutral” manner. However, every text is written and every larp is designed from some kind of a political perspective. Selecting a topic is already a political choice. When something is referred to as “neutral”, it is usually because it reflects the default assumptions in the society.
There have been some larps about the Finnish civil war of 1918. To my knowledge, the most recent one was Viena 1918 (2014) (“Viena Karelia 1918”). The head organizer, Mikko Heimola (2014) wrote that he wanted to equally portray both parties of the conflict as farcical, oppressive, and stupid. However, this is a political choice as much as presenting one side as better than the other would have been.
Games can be political even when they don’t seem to be. What if the organizers of De tusen rosornas väg had never told the players that the songs came from Hitler Jugend, so that they would have been left to believe the game was a harmless fantasy adventure?
The game would still have been political, just in a different, rather frightening way. Now imagine that the songs were not direct translations from the Hitler Jugend songbook, but had similar themes. Imagine they were really written by the organizers. Imagine that the organizers had never read the Hitler Jugend songbook and were unaware of any connections.
Doesn’t the case of De tusen rosornas väg demonstrate that the Hitler Jugend songs embodied something that is rather commonplace in “harmless” fantasy? If there had been elements that felt out of place or disturbing, would the players have been so surprised after the game?
Thinking through the post-game discussion When designing games, the organizers should take into account that they can affect player experience even after the game, in particular if there is a strong connection to reality. Debrief is often viewed as part of the design. Maybe post-game discussions should be seen in similar light, especially as online groups provide a means to continue collective processing for an extended period of time.
Organizing larps is stressful. When making Halat hisar we did not give much thought to what would happen beyond the after-party. The game turned out more intense than we had dared to hope, so we created a Facebook group for the players to process their experience. The game was an emotional experience for us organizers as well, and in the beginning, I thought I could freely express myself in the group the same way the players did.
I quickly realized this was a mistake. As an organizer, I was in a position of power and I could not discuss with the players on an equal footing. My posts were interpreted differently, and things I said could be seen as attempts to reframe player experiences.
Some players felt that participating in the game had forced a political agenda on them in the eyes of the organizers and other players. They felt that everyone in the group was assumed to be, in the words of one player, a pro-Palestinian activist.
Now that I read the posts again after a year of distance, I am almost surprised at how little controversy there was. Nevertheless, the discussions made me emotional at the time. To correct my mistake, I decided to refrain from commenting as best as I could. Sometimes I did not even dare to “like” comments of others because I didn’t want to steer the discussion.
However, trying to stay away from all political discussion was a mistake, too. It’s a good idea to give the players space to think for themselves and not to flood them with explanations and information. But nothing happens in a void. There is a political context outside the online group, and it, too, affects the discussion.
Sometimes it is the organizers’ responsibility to take a stand. For instance, some players criticized Halat hisar for being “one-sided”.
We made the choice to take the viewpoint of the occupied because the oppressors and the oppressed are not two equal sides. To present them so is to take the side of the stronger party, the oppressors. Some of the members of the processing group were Palestinians who live their daily lives under occupation. Taking this into consideration, I feel that it would have been my responsibility to point out the real-world power imbalance that we wished to tackle by concentrating on the experience of the oppressed.
In summary, as a part of the design process, larp organizers should think about how they will take part in post-game discussions. A player debrief group is not a debrief group for the organizers, who should be conscious about their positions of power.
It is important to leave the players the freedom to discuss the game content. However, real-world political context and the diversity of players should also be taken into account, and the organizers have the responsibility to moderate when needed.
Michal Mochocki (2012): Reliving Sarmatia: National Heritage Relived in the Polish Larp Scene, in States of Play: Nordic Larp Around the World, Helsinki: Pohjoismaisen roolipelaamisen seura.
Peter Munthe-Kaas (2010): System Danmarc: Political Action Larp, in Nordic Larp. Stockholm: Fëa Livia
Cover photo: Students and foreign visitors demonstrate against a visiting dignitary from the occupying government. (Halat hisar, play, Johannes Axner) is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
When I design scenarios, I try to use the terminology from the Nordic larp discourse. But many of thes styles “available” confuse me and my players instead of clarifying what the larps are actually about.
One of the problems is that many styles are defined by what they are not, instead of what they are. Because of this, I would like to introduce a new way of thinking about larp terminology. The hope is to make my design choices clearer and open my mind to new ways of designing larp.
I chose terminology from visual art, since that’s (also) about taking something intangible and turning it into something concrete.
First we need to unmuddle the picture as we know it today. This means that I will try to use only only the necessary terminology that we know from roleplaying today.
In art we talk about form, media, style and genre to define the work of art. These are the definitions I will go through and try to convert into terminologies that can be used for larp (and roleplaying in general).
Form and Media
An artform is defined by its shape or artistic expression, which often is defined by its media.
Examples of different kinds of shapes in visual art: painting, sculptures, crafts, photography, film and architecture.
Roleplaying doesn’t have shapes, but is defined by its artistic expressions of interaction. At one end of the spectrum, we find tabletop RPGs, and at the other we find larp. In the middle we find a lot of more or less recognized bastard children; freeform, semi-larp, etc.
Style
The style of art depending on the artform. As mentioned before, I will refer to visual art, but to make it even more concrete, I’m referring to styles of paintings in this and the subsequent section.
The style is a way to frame the art. For an artform as roleplaying the style makes the expression more understandable. To exemplify I’ll go through some painting styles.
Naturalism and realism seem similar to many, but have their differences. Where realism tries to capture the reality as it is, naturalism beautifies reality. It’s legal to remove or add something from a naturalist picture. This would be prohibited in realism. Also, realism usually focuses on the harsher aspects of life.
Realism in roleplaying consists of simulations of reality. An example on a scenario which tried to achieve this is the danish larp U-359 from 2004. The larp took place in an actual (decommisioned) submarine. Not only were historical reproduction uniforms included in the participants package, the organizers also clearly stated that the larp would be more simulation than drama.
Naturalism in roleplaying focuses on the good experience instead of the authenticity.
A naturalist larp might be a historical depiction of a rural medieval village (like the larp Brakowitz from 1998 did); but one where everyone cared a bit more and where everything was a bit more rosy (unlike in Brakowitz, where things were horrible).
Impressionism in roleplaying is where the simulation is comprised to make the important part of the game stand clear.
An example is the danish larp Uden guds nåde from 2009. The important elements were lighted with stage lighting and the rest of the game area was darkened when not in focus.
In cubism the artist describes an object or scene from multiple perspective at once.
Cubism roleplaying uses different perspectives simultaneously that are later combined so that each player gets an experience of several viewpoints.
An example is be the Danish freeform game Circus Without Boundaries from 2013. Here, the main mechanic is that each scene has one or more main characer(s) and several supporting players. The main character(s) can only talk, and must be moved around by the supporting players as lifesize dolls.
The physical position shows the thoughts of the main characters where the dialog is what the characters actually are doing. A scene could be that the main characters are doing the dishes, and the supporting players change their positions so that one of the main characters tries to strangle the other one.
Expressionism is about recognizable feelings, and not reality.
The larp White Death from 2012 was designed for Black Box play. In the game the players are pioneers climbing a mountain, but the climb is too harsh, and they die one after each another until nobody is left. The players can only make special mechanic movements that make it hard to move. They can only speak incomprehensible sounds, but when a character dies, the player shifts to playing the soul of the pioneer, and can now move freely and help the pioneers left to die. Since there is no dialogue, the experience and context is constructed in the heads of the players; in a very personal way.
There are many styles of art out there, and it’s not like I have definite answers. Some art styles can be compared with roleplaying and can be useful to us – others can’t.
Hopefully some of these art styles will inspire us to make new kinds of larps, just like Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque invented Cubism.
Genre
To round off, a few words on genre. In paintings the genre defines the theme of the picture. It can be landscapes, portraits etc.
These are unaffiliated of the style or form. In roleplaying we normally use literary genres to describe the game. These are normally fine to use, but can give problems regarding sandbox-games. The genre is often confused with style because its rarely these are split in literature. In art we have seen both naturalist and cubist landscape in a painting, but what about a cubist fantasy larp in roleplaying?
In 2014, I conducted a survey about attitudes towards photography and video in larp. I got nearly 500 responses from many different countries, and while I would love to publish the full results here, they’re a bit long for the scope of this KP book. The numbers are available at ars-amandi.se instead, and they’re really quite interesting, so I suggest you take a look if you’re organising or photographing any time soon. What I will do here is outline some of the different arguments and thought processes concerning the way we play and the way we document.
Images and the Nature of Larp
For good, bad, or ugly, we’ve all been photographed in larps. Someone has managed to catch that moment where your costume looked brilliant and you’re screaming at someone, and damned if you don’t look like a movie star. As organizers, we’ve also probably felt the crushing stupidity of not having recorded anything at a larp, and about three months later finding out that nobody cares about our larp if there aren’t pics.
We take images, share images, store images, publish images, broadcast images, and print images, in both still and moving form. So we should talk about images in larp.
Particularly in larp, because as it happens, larps are semi-private (and sometimes transgressive) events. One feature of larp that allows us to play some very interesting things is that the larp is a contained and (ideally) safe space, both physically and temporally.
Our collective understanding seems to be that transgressive play is at times fun and desired, so we make it possible through a space that is contingent – it only exists here and now, and in the context of a game. You might even wonder whether larp is safe so it can include transgression, or if larp became transgressive because it was “safe”.
The contingency of a larp is an important feature for many kinds of play, but also for many kinds of people.
What one player considers transgressive may be less remarkable to another player, and this may simply be a matter of life experience or taste, but can also relate to one’s situation in real life. A schoolteacher may want to play a murderer; a politician might want to play a coked-up rock star; a person in a committed relationship may want to play a fantasy romance; a judge might want to play a slave owner. Larp can offer some freedom of expression and play not only for transgressive or illegal acts, but it offers this to people whose real world lives impose restrictions on what they’re publicly allowed to consider “fun”.
We like to ask “what if” our world had different norms – for violence, sexuality, social structure, or pretty much anything else we can imagine. I, for one, am an artist and frankly can be photographed doing pretty much anything and it will only help me.
But I have seen people do things in larps that, if taken out of context, would ruin their career. I have seen people standing next to other players who were doing things that, if photographed, could ruin that person’s career. A third of the survey respondents reported that some in-game photos could cause trouble for them.
(Speaking of standing next to someone, one of the reasons why Facebook’s own facial recognition software is more accurate than the CIA’s is because Facebook knows who you know, and recognizes who you’re likely to be standing next to.
Just a fun fact for anyone who thinks that not tagging people by name on Facebook is sufficient to protect anonymity.)
Larp, as we have been doing it, is not a public performance; everyone present is complicit in the course of action and has both interest and agency in where the story goes. When you sign up, you might have a ballpark idea of what you’d like to do and what kind of activities you’ll indulge in, but I think most players would agree that if you knew beforehand exactly what was going to happen, there would be no point to larping at all.
Combine this with larp’s famous alibi for indulging in things we can’t do in real life, and this makes most players likely to do or say things that they can’t vet beforehand, and which might not be palatable if taken out of context – in part because the whole point of the larp was to create a context that would not be possible or morally defensible to live out in our real lives. This makes organizers responsible for at least some degree of privacy.
It’s not exactly a completely private event, either: we trust others – some of them near strangers – with our play. We work towards building this trust in person. And yet, we trust people who are potentially hostile with our images. Images do a great deal of violence to the safeness of a larp. They bring something from within the frame of the larp, outside that frame. They are objects that expand the agreed safe space in a way that is not predictable.
They have the potential to expand it very far geographically as well as temporally, and they very quickly collapse the context. They take a private-ish event and bring it into public consumption.
One recent example of this is the Czech larp Hell on Wheels, the first few runs of which included players who darkened their skin to play characters of African descent. This was largely unremarkable until photographs reached the larp community in the United States, where putting dark makeup on white skin to play a black person is inescapably racist and very offensive indeed.
The ensuing conversation saw accusations of racism towards the Czechs, imperialism toward the Americans, and rather a lot of publicity for the larp in a way that the Czech organisers likely never even considered.
Was the dialogue useful? Hard to say. On one hand, it often takes an outsider to an in-group to point out where your blind spots are. On the other, can the piece be condemned on the strength of its images alone, without hearing how the topic was handled in-game? Expect this issue to show up again:
72% of respondents said they’re okay with photos of themselves playing a different social group, class, or culture.
The Public Image of Larp
It’s curious that photographs from a larp get taken out of context so quickly – it almost seems as though people are waiting to find something. But perhaps that’s human nature. A photograph of the larp only recalls the event for someone who was actually there; for anyone else, the context stands only on the weight of what is visible in the picture.
The public does not (yet) understand larpers to be like actors. If Brad Pitt plays a Nazi, we all understand that Brad Pitt is a very cool guy for playing such a hardcore character; in interviews he can even discuss the humanity and interestingness of that role, and we will still understand Brad Pitt to be a pretty cool guy. However, Prince Harry dressing up as a Nazi to go to a costume party is apparently a problem, because for some reason the public feels that it sends an ambiguous message as to how he feels about Nazis; after all, he dressed up as one for fun.
Larpers seem to fall somewhat more on the Prince Harry side at the moment. If you are photographed playing a person dying of AIDS, or wearing black-face, the photograph does not in itself convey any information as to whether this photograph was cultural production (i.e. art) or “fun”, and the overwhelming impression seems to be that you will give off an air of endorsement. And then there’s the Daily Mail (see below):
Ironically, headlines like this one are exactly why photographs and videos from larps are also needed. The popular view of larps (sorry, ‘LARPS’), which to this day retains the hint of Satanism it’s enjoyed since the 1980s, is one in which a bunch of well-meaning but sadly broken people get together in the woods and push each other psychologically until they can’t tell what’s real anymore.
Then someone dies, and it’s the plot of a blockbuster movie.
There will always be a misrepresented “popular view” for those who are outsiders of any activity, just as there is one for contemporary art (“My six year old could’ve painted that”) or sport (“Team sports are just a sublimation of the war impulse”). All of these are created by a combination of images and ignorance. Larp could benefit from having more images in the public – good images, attached to positive advocacy.
Interestingly, Cosmic Joke’s teaser and 18 min. documentary about College of Wizardry (2014) seemed to attract the “right” kind of press: admiration for a job well done, cool costumes and setting, and respect for the sheer crazy guts to put 120-200 people (depending on which article you read) in a castle for 2-5 days (depending on which article you read) to play as Harry Potter/in Hogwarts/in the Potterverse/in the Polandverse (depending on which article you read).
It appears to be the first single larp to get global media attention – and what’s more, positive media attention. The trailer and teaser combined had over one million hits on YouTube, among them Warner Brothers execs who had a few words to say about intellectual property – but that’s another essay entirely.
It should be noted that even the “wtf-type” attention garnered by the documentation of Panopticorp (2013) also caught the eye of people internationally who were interested in running the game; so clearly larpers know how to read between the lines of the Daily Mail. It seems that video documentation in particular is useful for getting media attention, and media attention is, we assume, good for the larp scene. It is certainly helpful for getting venues, financing, and interest for one’s next big project.
What to Record, When, Why, and How
It’s quite clear that players love photographs of themselves and their friends; particularly in the 48-or-so hours directly after a larp, players cry out for the visual proof that tells them yes, they were really there and they looked beautiful with all that snot running all over their faces after all their friends died and they had a desolate epiphany about their own existence. Most of us are guilty as charged here.
No organizer I spoke to would dream of letting a larp go un-photographed. For grant money, for pitches, for clout, for academic research, for being able to contribute to the ongoing creation of the Nordic larp canon, evidence is simply essential. It’s participation.
Video is a bit more fraught. Most respondents are okay with or enthusiastic about video so long as they know beforehand that it’s going to be there. My biggest beef here is that video crews and larpers aren’t used to each other – the boom operator will put a mic in the middle of a scene, and half of the larpers will shut up because it suddenly feels like filming a TV show and they don’t want to mess it up, or they’ll move out of the shot because they don’t want to be on camera. Video crews can literally alter the plot this way.
But either way, larp documentation is here to stay. So I’ll finish up with a little bit of advocacy and again invite you to check out the survey.
Should I Have In-game Photographs?
Yes, in general. People love them. If you want to be a bit sensitive and avoid affecting play, only photograph public scenes – or have your photographers playing characters, so we can interact with them, pose for them, or tell them to go away.
Should I Have Off-game Photographs?
Even better. A surprising number of people (67%) reported they were willing to recreate scenes afterwards for the purposes of photography. I would love to see an organizer design for this – it’s opt-in, and to anyone who wasn’t there, it’s not likely to make a lick of difference. Also, players are often quite happy with one or two decent character portraits.
When Should My Photo and Video Plans Be Communicated to the Players?
Before sign-up. A quarter of respondents reported they’d been photographed in-game without knowing there would be cameras present. The same amount agreed that we need photography policies as part of the sign-up process.
How Many Photographs Do I Need for Documentation?
I think there’s such a thing as too many photographs. If you want to make a film, go make a film. If you want to make a larp, for goodness’ sake leave players alone and let them play.
Should My Photographers and Video Crew Be In- or Off-game?
Respondents slightly favor in-game, by a factor of about 20%.
Can I Photograph Sensitive Scenes?
Ask your players. Maybe agree that interrogations or sex scenes won’t be photographed. Don’t assume everyone has the same common sense. Players (60%) reported their immersion gets really interrupted by the presence of a camera in a tough scene.
Is It the Player’s Responsibility to Tell a Photographer to Go Away?
Tricky. Some players will not want to go off-game to do this. Some will be playing characters of low agency, and this can affect the agency they take as a player.
Can I Use Hidden Video Cameras or Gopro’s to Be Less Intrusive?
Merlin’s Beard, no. Unless you’ve communicated it to your players and they either know where the cameras are, or they are totally okay with playing with hidden cameras, don’t do this. Always allow players to review hidden camera footage.
Can I Post to Instagram During Run-time?
No. Unless it’s part of your design, no no no.
Do Players Really Need to Vet Pictures Before They’re Published?
It’s a pain in the ass, but it’s their face you’re using, and you might not know what’s okay for them. It’s polite to do so.
But I Want to Do a Larp Where Photography Is Part of the Meta/rules/world!
Of course! Most players (78%) would love to play something where photography works as a game mechanic.
Photos and videos have the power to delight us, make our larps better, improve the scene and help us convince outsiders to take us seriously. Because of the nature of what we sometimes do together, photos and videos – and even just the act of taking them – have the power to violate the trust we place in each other. Larp is not a public performance – 69% of you agreed with this statement. It’s up to us to find ways to keep our hobby dangerous while we show it to the world.
Larp is traditionally participatory in nature. Fortunately, there’s been a great introspective and analytical tradition accompanying the continuing push against the ever moving boundaries of what’s possible and what’s been attempted. Yet it seems that our vocabulary has not grown at the same rate as the art form itself.
This article will attempt to cover some of the recent strides towards enriching that vocabulary. It presents the findings of several projects each exploring the nature of larp by investigating how the play and narrative experience change when mediated through computer/larp hybrids. These projects have investigated the interactive digital narrative academic literature, and have come away with a range of terms and concepts directly applicable to larp.
It is my hope that this article will both provide the community with an enriched vocabulary for conversing about our art form, and an expanded analytical toolbox for designing and researching larps.
Before jumping into the murky waters of terminology, let’s first ensure that we’re on the same riverbank. There’s been many endeavours to define role-playing, and I’d like to add my voice to the cacophony. But it’s my hope that by refining and combining the current definition attempts, we can turn the cacophony into a choir instead.
Can’t You See I’m Role-playing?
Based on my experience with the different forms of role-playing, the definitions of Hitchens & Drachen((Hitchens,M.,& Drachen,A.(2008).The many faces of role-playing games.International journal of role-playing,1(1),3-21.)), Arjoranta((Arjoranta, J. (2011). Defining Role-Playing Games as Language-Games. International journal of role-playing, 1(2), 3-17.)) and Montola((Montola, M., 2008.The invisible rules of role- playing.The social framework of role-playing process. International journal of role-playing, 1(1), pp.22–36)), as well as the results from my thesis projects((Temte, B. F. (2014). I, Herosmaton? Unpublished Master Thesis, Department of Architecture, Design and Media Technology, Section of Medialogy, Aalborg University Copenhagen. Supervisors: Bruni, L.E. & Eladhari, M.)) ((Temte, B. F., & Schoenau-Fog, H. (2012). Coffee tables and cryo chambers: a comparison of user experience and diegetic time between traditional and virtual environment-based roleplaying game scenarios. In Interactive Storytelling (pp. 102-113). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.)) ((Temte, B. F. (2011). Project Restless Sleep – An Experimental Framework for Investigating the Change in User Experience of Roleplaying Games in Virtual Environments. Unpublished Bachelor Thesis, Department of Architecture, Design and Media Technology, Section of Medialogy, Aalborg University Copenhagen. Supervisor:
Schoenau-Fog, H.)), I would argue that there are a number of different processes to what we are currently calling role-playing:
Textoring (Lit: weaver): Exploring the potential story evolution possibilities, I.e. the story-space((The complete set of potential story evolutions for the story in its current state)), and consequently manufacturing a personal, curated story-subspace instance, focused on the nodes deemed favourable to an engaging story evolution.
Auctoring (Lit: authoring, acting, originator): (Re)defining the character itself, including personality traits and background. This is both done as part of the initial character creation process, performed by either the player or an author, and at runtime by the player and possibly also the GM.
Ductoring (Lit: guiding, leading, commanding): Determining the appropriate actions/utterances for the character in the given situation. Performed at runtime, with some ductoring taking place during character creation regarding background events.
Rectoring (Lit: ruling, directing, mastering): Directing the story through the actions/utterances of the character. Only at runtime, arguably some planning during initial character creation.
Cantoring (Lit: acting, playing, poet): Portraying/acting out the character physically, including body movements, tone of voice, facial gestures etc. Only at runtime. While one could argue that cantoring may be contemplated prior to runtime, in order to best get a sense of the character’s physical mannerisms, I would label such contemplations as auctoring. However, it is quite common for role- players to explore the mental exercise of imagining their character in various situations, and so a degree of overlap is theoretically possible.
Quod-core
With these processes as a foundation, it’s now possible to formulate a new definition of Role-Playing:
A type of Pretence-Play where Participants interact, often through rules, with a diegetic world through the continuous ductoring and possibly cantoring, rectoring and auctoring, of distinct characters, thus collaboratively co-textoring an emergent, ephemeral narrative.
The core of role-playing is thus, in the presented definition, not the playing of a role per se. Rather, it’s the ductoring of the character(s) you control, the continuous process of evaluating the appropriate and relevant actions for the character and situation, that is the heart of our artform. Whether you then describe or act out the chosen action(s) is of lesser importance, and covered by the definition as well. One would argue that ductoring could also happen e.g. when you read a book or watch a movie. I completely agree, and posit that these examples are also to a large extent role-playing, the only major difference being the degree of interactivity offered by the medium.
Basing media interaction on reader- response theory, the definition also takes this into account through mentioning ‘participants interacting with’.
However, ductoring doesn’t say anything about whether you actually act upon these evaluations. You may be ductoring with/by yourself in a cupboard for 12 hours, without ever moving or saying anything. When larping, a more important concept is thus to which degree you’re acting on behalf of your character or yourself. I define this as the degree of herosproxy.
When exhibiting a low degree of herosproxy, you’re essentially playing and acting as yourself in the given situations, with little regard for your player character’s motivations and personality. Reversely, a high degree of herosproxy signifies both a large amount of ductoring, and that said ductoring is being reflected and acted upon. Therefore, herosproxy is the most relevant real-world measure of role-playing.
What IDS Brought along…
I’d now like to present some of the terminology that the interactive digital storytelling academic community has developed for better understanding and researching their, and to a large extent our, field.
Aarseth((Aarseth, E. (2012, May). A narrative theory of games. In Proceedings of the international conference on the foundations of digital Games (pp. 129-133). ACM.)) divides narrative elements into Kernels and Satellites, kernels being story elements/events which define the story, and satellites being elements/events without which the story would still be recognisable. Clearly, this distinction does not take into account the ephemerality of role-playing stories, but it still gives us terms to distinguish between primary and secondary events/elements. Likewise, one could argue that a larpwright should focus on kernels, letting the satellites happen on their own.
1. The Network – A partially connected, cyclic graph with uni- and bi-directional paths
2. The Complete Graph – Fully connected bi-directional paths
3. The Tree – Unidirectional (from top to bottom), every traversal is a well-formed plot.
4. The Vector with Side Branches – One main direction, with bi-directional subplots.
5. The Maze – Structure typical for adventure games.
6. Directed Network (“flow chart”)
7. The Hidden Story – Plotting navigation on to time.
8. The Braided Plot – Events and destiny lines.
9. Action Space or Epic Wandering – System defined plot with user choices for action.
Figure 1: Ryan’s 9 interactive narrative structures((Ryan, M. L. (2001). Narrative as virtual reality. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.)). Illustrations from ((Temte,B.F.,Aabom,H.T.,Bevensee,S.H.,Boisen,K.A.D.,& Olsen,M.P.(2013).Aporia:Codename Still LakeValley – Exploring the Merge of Game-play and Narrative through Multiplayer Cooperation and Storytelling.Unpublished project report,Department of Architecture, Design and Media Technology, Section of Medialogy, Aalborg University Copenhagen. Supervisor: Bruni, L.E.)).
Ryan((Ryan, M. L. (2001). Narrative as virtual reality. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.)) presents nine different interactive narrative structures, along with their individual characteristics, with a tenth added by myself((Temte, B. F. (2014). I, Herosmaton? Unpublished Master Thesis, Department of Architecture, Design and Media Technology, Section of Medialogy, Aalborg University Copenhagen. Supervisors: Bruni, L.E. & Eladhari, M.)), this being ‘Instigating Event with Conflict-laden Characters’. The nine original can be seen on figure 1.
I have yet to come up with a suitable illustration for Instigating Event with Conflict-laden Characters. The ten structures can work as tools for designing and framing conversations about larp structures as well.
Ryan((Ryan, M. L. (2008). Interactive narrative, plot types, and interpersonal relations. In Interactive Storytelling (pp. 6-13). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.)) also proposes two different types of immersion in interactive narratives, these being ludic and narrative immersion. She also distinguishes between spatial, temporal and emotional narrative immersion.
Additionally, Ryan suggests three distinct types of plot in interactive stories, with each plot type primarily suitable for a specific narrative immersion:
Epic: Focuses on the struggle of the individual to survive in a hostile world – Spatial Immersion
Dramatic: The evolution of a network of human relations – Emotional Immersion
Epistemic: The desire to solve a mystery – Temporal Immersion (components of which are curiosity, surprise and suspense).
We’re also given a tool for categorising player actions/utterances, where Theune, Linnsen and Alofs((Theune, M., Linssen, J., & Alofs, T. (2013). Acting, Playing, or Talking about the Story: An Annotation Scheme for Communication during Interactive Digital Storytelling. In Interactive Storytelling (pp. 132-143). Springer International Publishing.)) construct a scheme:
This works very well for categorising e.g. player utterances when analysing larp play (see((Temte, B. F. (2014). I, Herosmaton? Unpublished Master Thesis, Department of Architecture, Design and Media Technology, Section of Medialogy, Aalborg University Copenhagen. Supervisors: Bruni, L.E. & Eladhari, M.))).
Reference
Perspective
Story
Game
Reality
Character
CS: In-character utterances and imitations
CG: In-character references to game elements
CR:In-character references to events or objects outside play
Player
PLS: Action suggestions and proposals referring to the story
PLG: Communication about game aspects
PLR: Including real-life events or objects in the game frame
Person
PES: Observations about events that happened in the story
PEG: Observations about the interface, opinions about the game
PER: Communications about events or objects outside play
Figure 2: Theune, Linnsen and Alofs PxR annotation scheme((Theune, M., Linssen, J., & Alofs, T. (2013). Acting, Playing, or Talking about the Story: An Annotation Scheme for Communication during Interactive Digital Storytelling. In Interactive Storytelling (pp. 132-143). Springer International Publishing.)). Illustration from((Temte, B. F. (2014). I, Herosmaton? Unpublished Master Thesis, Department of Architecture, Design and Media Technology, Section of Medialogy, Aalborg University Copenhagen. Supervisors: Bruni, L.E. & Eladhari, M.))
Mine, My Own, My Propositions
In ((Temte, B. F., & Schoenau-Fog, H. (2012). Coffee tables and cryo chambers: a comparison of user experience and diegetic time between traditional and virtual environment-based roleplaying game scenarios. In Interactive Storytelling (pp. 102-113). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.)), I define Diegetic Adherence to be the degree to which diegetic time equals real time, i.e. whether the larp is running on a 1:1 time, or e.g. features flashbacks/slow motion. This term can both be used for describing/discussing/designing larps, and for analytic purposes.
Hulk, Meet Spock
I also here propose two non-opposed play styles/attributes; Cerebral and Embodied. The distinction here is whether the player seeks out the intellectual challenge(s) or instead strives to be physically/emotionally affected by the larp/situation. Cerebral gamists thus enjoy the intellectual challenge of a mystery or tactical battle, whereas embodied gamists thrive on e.g. the adrenaline response of the battle itself. Embodied immersionists aim for becoming their character, whereas cerebral immersionists are more akin to simulationists, aiming instead for experiencing being in the diegetic world.
Dramaticists with a cerebral focus, enjoy shaping the story and influencing/ experiencing its fl ow and aesthetics, whereas embodied dramaticists instead seek the emotional response from entering the story. I do not see these terms as necessarily being directly in opposition however. Larps/situations where you’re both intellectually and emotionally engrossed are easily imagined.
Exploding the Player Character
In ((Temte, B. F. (2014). I, Herosmaton? Unpublished Master Thesis, Department of Architecture, Design and Media Technology, Section of Medialogy, Aalborg University Copenhagen. Supervisors: Bruni, L.E. & Eladhari, M.)), I define the ALHFa-PAV categorisation (pronounced Alpha-Paw) as a way of dividing and discussing the components of a player character:
Avatar: Physical manifestation of person in another reality. Navigational and ludic focus in games. In larps, the avatar is ourselves.
Locus: The visual appearance of a particular avatar. How we look, with costume, makeup, expression and props.
Herosmaton: The specific contents of the person schema of a player character, including personality traits, goals, background etc.
Facies: The countenance/appearance of a particular herosmaton. How the herosmaton looks inside the imagined diegesis.
Player Character: The combined avatar, locus, herosmaton and facies, along with its more ludic characteristics, e.g. strength score, hit points etc., and the actions available to it, defined below as Ago and Vis.
Ago: The verbs available to the particular PC, such as run, jump, shoot etc.
Vis: The ludic stats associated with the PC, such as hit points, strength score etc.
It’s my hope that our community may adopt some or all of the terms, hereby easing the joint communication and understanding of the player character elements.
Picking Nits
There is little doubt that bleed as a larp term and concept is both relevant and real (for a given definition of real).
But given the pre-existing uses and meanings associated with bleed as a term outside the role-playing community, and the fact that I’m a nerd when it comes to terms/classifications, I would propose to rename the concept Flusentio (in/ex) [Lit: Flow/bleed of feelings]. Influsentio would thus be emotions, characteristics and/ or opinions flowing/bleeding from player to character, with Exflusentio denoting flowing/ bleeding from character to player.
Concerning Genres
Usually, when discussing larps, we refer to the genre as based on those of Hollywood movies. The Danish larp theorist Jacob Nielsen proposes that we instead/additionally adopt the vocabulary of the art world as a way of discussing our works and the intentions of the authors.
For instance, playing a social realism drama expressionistically will yield a very different play through than the exact same larp played abstractly, impressionistically or post-modern. Therefore, I strongly encourage you read Jacob Nielsen’s thought-provoking article on styles in larp in this book.
I hope that the usefulness and relevance of these terms are clear, and encourage further debates about and expansions of our shared vocabulary. I also hope that the term-nado I’ve just unleashed has either blown you away, or at least ruffled your feathers enough that a productive debate will ensue, at whichever decibel level you prefer.
